barnard creative writing portfolio

Writing Fellows

Welcome to the writing fellows program.

Applications to become a Writing Fellow are live !

Writing Fellows are generous and critical readers. They ask questions so that the writer can clarify, explain, expand and explore their writing. They are not tutors or TAs. It is not their role to comment on the accuracy of the content or to grade a students’ paper. We believe—and our practice reflects—that every work a writer brings us belongs to the voice of the writer. 

Having finished their training, they staff the Erica Mann Jong '63 Writing Center and work in courses across the disciplines. They conference with students about written assignments to help clarify, organize, and strengthen content, so that a non-expert can understand the assignment.

Our work is built on the foundational belief that knowledge production can happen outside of a classroom and is not solely dependent on a professor. Worlds of knowledge can be built between peers and the experiences they bring to conversations when they listen and respond to each other.

Science Fellows

Science Fellows are students, often with a background in the sciences, who work as a subset of the Writing Fellows. They encourage scientific accessibility and literacy throughout campus and work closely with science faculty across departments to support students in developing skills to describe and interpret data, use scientific language clearly and concisely, and blend the skills learned in humanities classes with scientific ones. Science Writing Fellows receive the same training as do all Writing Fellows, which explores scientific writing and lab reports through critical thought and an engagement with writing pedagogy.

The Science of Writing

Learn how the Science Writing Fellows developed and the importance of centering writing in the sciences from this Winter 2022 feature in  Barnard's Magazine . 

Brief History of the Program

According to a 1992 article in Barnard Magazine , the first iteration of the Writing Fellows Program was the Writing Project. Use this timeline to explore a history of the Program, its projects, and mission. 

Barnard Year of Science: Science Writing Fellows

Barnard's Year of Science featured Jasmine Wang '23, a science writing fellow who helps other students with writing assignments for their science classes.

Writing and Literature

The Writing and Literature track encourages writers to find their voice and share it with the world. Students will spend their mornings learning from Barnard instructors in courses such as Screenwriting, Dystopia in the Margins, and Poetry, on the same campus where writers like Greta Gerwig, Zora Neale Hurson, Jhumpa Lahiri got their start. Afternoons will be spent in intensives focused on developing a writing portfolio, getting published, and careers for writers.

Program Structure

Classes take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. 

Office Hours, Junior Junction and Leadership in Action Workshops will be held on Monday and Friday. 

Student life activities will be held in the evenings after class.

The Curriculum

Dystopia in the margins (session 1).

Dystopia in the Margins 

Instructor: Mimi Wong

“Dystopia in the Margins” will explore dystopian fiction from the perspective of minority writers, specifically those belonging to the Asian diaspora. Over the course of three weeks, we will read and discuss three contemporary novels: Severance by Ling Ma, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee. The course is designed to cultivate critical reading and writing skills, while engaging with topics such as identity, race, class, globalization, and the impact of capitalism.

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film (Session 1&2)

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film

Instructor: Bess Frankel

This course will give you the empowering tools to recognize a creative idea in your imagination, and use the medium of screenwriting to make it come to life. You will write, workshop, or refine your voice as a screenwriter, while watching films that will inspire and challenge you. We will explore the foundations of three-act structure, beat sheets, and the Young Hero’s Journey, before interrogating how to best tell stories in our own way. Throughout this course, we will explore questions like: What makes a great opening scene you can’t turn off? How can genres like science fiction or horror enhance a story about the human experience? How do we uplift our personal experiences through memoir writing? We will study almost a dozen films, widely varied in style and approach, but almost all of them exclusively made by and starring women. In addition to classroom screenings, we will make use of incredible opportunities across New York City; past field trips have included the Museum of Modern Art and the Metrograph Theater. By the end of the course, you will have written 3-4 short screenplays. Between watching, discussing, and writing, this course is an all-encompassing love letter to film and women’s place in it.

Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture (Session 1&2)

Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture

Instructor: Tara Needham

What does it mean to “close read”? Does the author’s biography matter in understanding a novel? What about the time and place that the text was written? This course will introduce students to a range of habits, practices, and approaches to writing about literature and culture that will deepen how one can respond to and interpret a novel, a poem, and various other cultural artifacts. At the same time, we will engage in writing practices that empower students to locate and express what interests them about a particular piece of writing or culture, to make a claim about it, and to articulate that claim against other interpretations. Foundational to this endeavor is re-envisioning the writing process, from an isolated, individual experience to one that involves collaboration and conversation; copious in-class writing; peer workshops; drafts and revision; and the inclusion of research and theoretical frames. We will use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as one of our main texts to open up questions of humankind’s relationship to science, technology, and progress (among many other themes!), accompanied by additional readings, films, visits to the Barnard library and Archives as well as excursions that expand the world of our writing and the objects we seek to understand.

The Instructors

Dystopia in the Margins

Mimi Wong writes about art, culture, and literature. For her work engaging with contemporary art by artists from the Asian diaspora, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has been published in The Believer , Catapult , Electric Literature , Hyperallergic , Literary Hub , and Refinery29 . She is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine The Offing and a part-time lecturer at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bess Frankel

Screenwriting

Bess Frankel is a director, writer, and teaching artist based in New York City. Her work has been a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, Jewish Plays Project, the Drama League’s Beatrice Terry Residency, and twice the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series. As an associate/assistant director, Bess has worked on Broadway, the Public Theater, the Signature Theater, the Goodman Theater, among others. She was the long-term assistant to playwright Lynn Nottage and was the Manager of New Work Development for Ms. Nottage’s production company, Market Road Films. Bess is also the Co-Director and Head of Playwriting for CreateHER, a free theatre education program for girls and non-binary high school students, and teaches Screenwriting at Barnard College’s summer high school program. Bess received a BFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Michigan (Go Blue) and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. Member: SDC; Dramatists Guild.

Tara Needham

‘Tara Emelye Needham is a Ph. D candidate in Literary Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has taught extensively in the fields of literature, writing, and critical theory at diverse institutions, including Skidmore College, Bilkent University in Ankara Türkiye, and most recently at Bard College, where she also served as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Tara’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online journals and the archives of her 90’s feminist zine Cupsize are held in the Barnard Special Collections.

Bridging Curriculum and Community

We believe student life does not start and end in the classroom. Each night after class, students can participate in activities led by our residential student staff.

Community Office Hours

Each Monday, students are invited to meet with any member of our Pre-College Programs team. Office hours emphasize PCP’s open door office policy and gives students a space to meet with their instructor, Peer Academic Leader, or a professional staff member.

Technology and Academic Support

Canvas and email access.

Barnard PCP utilizes Canvas, an online platform, where students will find their syllabus, assignments, discussion boards, and access to message their instructor or peers outside of class.

Students will also receive a PCP email to use for the duration of the program.

Our team will go over technology usage in the student manual and during Orientation.

English Faculty

Full-time faculty.

Atefeh Akbari

James G. Basker

Christopher Baswell

Meredith Benjamin

Jennifer Boylan

Benjamin Breyer

Kristin Carter

Kristi Cassaro

Yvette Christiansë

Pamela Cobrin

Monica Cohen

Vrinda Condillac

Patricia Denison

Rachel Eisendrath

Peggy Ellsberg

Lisa Gordis

Nathan Gorelick

Achsah Guibbory

Kim F. Hall

Ross Hamilton

Jayne Hildebrand

Maria Hinojosa

Quincy Jones

Jennie Kassanoff

Daniela Kempf

Jhumpa Lahiri

Cecelia Lie-Spahn

Andrew Lynn

Hisham Matar

Francesca Ochoa

Eugene Petracca

Peter Platt

Andrew Ragni

Wendy Schor-Haim

William Chapman Sharpe

Michael Shelichach

Maura Spiegel

Duygu Oya Ula

Penelope Meyers Usher

Alexandra Watson

Elizabeth Weybright

Spring 2024 part-time faculty.

Emily Austin

Marissa Davis

Joey de Jesus

Farnoosh Fathi

Liana Finck

Shelly Fredman

Elisa gonzalez.

Nellie Hermann

Alexandra Horowitz

Linn Cary Mehta

Cleyvis Natera

John Pagano

Sarah Schwartz

Nina Sharma

Christine Smallwood

Kathleen tolan.

Archives and Creative Writing

• What are Archives?
• Archival Access
• Archives-Based Writing Prompts
• Bibliography: Craft
• Bibliography: Theory
• Teaching Creative Writing with Archives
• Citing Archival Sources

Martha Tenney

Welcome! Here you will find resources about using archives for creative writing projects. 

• Next: What are Archives? >>
• Last Updated: Sep 25, 2023 1:16 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.barnard.edu/archives-creative-writing

Department website: http://english.barnard.edu/

417 Barnard Hall   212-854-2116 [email protected]

Department Administrator:  Department Assistant: Julissa Acosta Drew Fellow of English and Creative Writing: Sarah Hilligoss

The offering in English is designed to foster good writing, effective speaking, and heightened understanding of culturally significant texts. We encourage students majoring in English to develop their responsiveness to the literary imagination and their sensitivity to literary form through disciplined attention to language, historical contexts, and critical and scholarly methods.

For all students, including transfers, a minimum of six semester courses must be completed while the student is in residence at Barnard.

Student Learning Objectives for the English Major and the American Literature, Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Concentrations

Our objectives represent the teaching aims of the English Department. All instructors are free to decide which of these objectives are consistent with their particular courses and teaching methods.

Students who graduate with a major in English should be able to obtain the following objectives:

• demonstrate critical and analytical reading skills.
• demonstrate critical and analytical writing skills.
• display an understanding of literary genre, form, and language.
• show a familiarity with the issues of literary criticism and theory.
• show an awareness of literary history.
• engage deeply with at least one major author.
• incorporate secondary sources, with proper citations, in a larger essay.
• understand texts in their cultural contexts.

Specific to the America Literature Concentration:

• demonstrate familiarity with American authors and texts across the span of American literary history.
• analyze American texts of various genres including poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, and political documents.
• write a substantial research project on American texts. This project should integrate primary and secondary materials, demonstrating the student's ability to analyze texts and her familiarity with the critical landscape.

Specific to the Creative Writing Concentration:

• develop a mastery of the linguistic demands of a variety of literary forms.
• demonstrate a critically sound grasp of structure in prose and poetry.
• explore the formal possibilities of the genres in which they are working.
• develop critical sophistication in reading and speaking about others' work.
• grasp the importance of thoroughly revising their own work.
• detect concrete and figurative language in others’ work.
• achieve precision in their own use of concrete and figurative language.
• produce an original piece of fiction, a set of poems, a play, or a work of creative non-fiction.

Specific to the Film Studies Concentration:

• explain the major concepts or ideas of film theory.
• write a basic/elementary screenplay.
• demonstrate an understanding of film’s relationship to a range of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

Specific to the Theatre Concentration:

• analyze dramatic literature in the context of theatre history, theory, criticism, and performance.
• develop skills in critical reading and writing, textual analysis, independent research, and oral presentation.

Chair Ross Hamilton (Professor)

Associate Chair Patricia Denison (Senior Lecturer; English Department/Theatre Department Liaison)

Professors James Basker (Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History) Christopher Baswell (Acting Director, Film Studies) Yvette Christiansë (Claire Tow Chair of Africana Studies and English Literature) Lisa Gordis Achsah Guibbory Kim Hall (Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies) Jennie Kassanoff (Professor of English; Adolph S. and Effie Ochs Professor of American Studies and History) Jhumpa Lahiri (Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English; Director, Creative Writing Program) Peter Platt (Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English) William Sharpe

Associate Professor Rachel Eisendrath (Director, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program)

Assistant Professors Ken Chen (Associate Director, Creative Writing Program) Jayne Hildebrand

Professor of Professional Practice Hisham Matar (Professor of Professional Practice in English and Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures)

Senior Lecturers Pamela Cobrin (Co-Director, First-Year Seminar Program; Director, Writing Program; Director, Speaking Program) Peggy Ellsberg Wendy Schor-Haim (Director, First-Year Writing Program) Maura Spiegel (Term)

Lecturers Meredith Benjamin (Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Benjamin Breyer (Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Vrinda Condillac (Lecturer in First-Year Writing; Interim Co-Director, First-Year Seminar Program) Daniela Kempf (Associate Director, Speaking Program) Cecelia Lie-Spahn (Lecturer in English; Director, First-Year Writing Workshop Program; Associate Director, First-Year Writing Program) Andrew Lynn (Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Penelope Meyers Usher (Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Duygu Ola Ula (Lecturer in First-Year Writing; Lecturer in Film Studies) Alexandra Watson (Lecturer in First-Year Writing; Associate Director, Writing Program)

Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence Jennifer Finney Boylan

Distinguished Journalist in Residence Maria Hinojosa

Term Assistant Professors Atefeh Akbari Shamirzadi Kristin Sánchez Carter Kristi Cassaro Nathan Gorelick Eugene Petracca

Term Lecturer Monica Cohen (Term Lecturer in Comparative Literature, English, and First-Year Seminar) Quincy Jones (Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Francesca Ochoa (Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Michael Shelichach (Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing) Elizabeth Weybright (Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing)

Post-Doctoral Fellow Andrew Ragni (Post-Doctoral Fellow in First-Year Writing)

Distinguished Visiting Professor Jonathan Beller (English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies)

Adjunct Associate Professors Elif Batuman (Visiting Writer) Nellie Hermann (Visiting Writer) Alexandra Horowitz Patricia Spears Jones (Visiting Writer) Ellen McLaughlin (Visiting Writer) Kathleen Tolan (Visiting Writer)

Adjunct Assistant Professors Zaina Arafat (Visiting Writer) Marisa Davis (Visiting Writer) Farnoosh Fathi (Visiting Writer) Liana Finck (Visiting Writer) Elisa Gonzalez (Visiting Writer) Brionne Janae (Visiting Writer) Cleyvis Natera (Visiting Writer) Christina Smallwood (Visiting Writer) Sarah Wang (Visiting Writer) Weike Wang (Visiting Writer)

Adjunct Lecturers Mary Cregan Linn Cary Mehta John Pagano Sarah Schwartz

Adjunct Associates Shelly Fredman Nina Sharma

Jump to a Section

Requirements for the Major American Literature Concentration Creative Writing Concentration Film Studies Concentration Theatre Concentration Requirements for the Minor

Requirements for the Major

A major program consists of at least ten courses that are a minimum of 35 credits in total. Six of the ten must be taken at Barnard or Columbia.

Taken in the junior year. All sections of BC3159 (fall semester) are on the Renaissance; all sections of BC3160 (spring semester) are on the Enlightenment. Students may substitute three courses for the two semesters of Colloquium. At least one of these three must cover literature before 1660 (i.e., Medieval or Renaissance); one other must cover literature of the 17th or 18th century (i.e., The Age of Enlightenment); the last can cover either literature before 1660 or literature of the 17th or 18th century. Students may also take one Colloquium and two substitutions, as long as one of the substitutions covers literature of the same period as the Colloquium it replaces. The other substitution may cover either literature of that same time period or literature of the time period of the other Colloquium. In either case, one of the courses used as a substitution for either Colloquium will also count towards satisfying the "before 1900" requirement.  Please note that only one Colloquium substitution may be a Shakespeare course. For further details, refer to the Substitutions tab above.

If you have substituted courses for the Colloquium requirement, one of the substitutions will count towards fulfillment of this requirement. For details, refer to the Substitutions tab above.

With the approval of the Chair of the Barnard Department of English, one course based in the literature of a foreign language (in English translation or in the original language) can count as an elective.

Seniors who wish to substitute an independent study for a senior seminar should consult the Chair of the English Department. Permission is given rarely and only to proposals meeting the criteria specified under the guidelines for ENGL BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY .

Concentrations in the Major

American literature.

An English major with a concentration in American literature consists of 10 courses that are a minimum of 35 credits in total. Six of the 10 must be taken at Barnard or Columbia. Students interested in an American literature concentration should consult with Prof. Jennie Kassanoff .

 If you have substituted courses for the Colloquium requirement, one of the substitutions will count towards fulfillment of this requirement. For details, refer to the Substitutions tab above.

Creative Writing

An English major with a concentration in creative writing consists of 11 courses that are a minimum of 38 credits in total. Six of the 11 must be taken at Barnard or Columbia. The creative writing concentration differs from the others in that students must submit an application to be considered for it.

Interested majors must be either in the second semester of their sophomore year or a junior to apply.  Applications are due by the last day of the advanced registration period in that semester (occurring in mid-April for the spring semester or in mid-November for the fall semester). The application deadline for English majors who are second semester sophomores or juniors in fall 2023 will be 11:59 pm ET on a Friday November, 19, 2023 . The application deadline for English majors who are second semester sophomores or juniors in spring 2024 will be 11:59 pm ET on a Friday April, 19, 2024 .

Applications must consist of 15-20 pages of prose (including fiction, personal narrative, creative non-fiction or playwriting) and/or poetry writing, and must be submitted online via the Barnard Creative Writing Concentration Application Form .

Students interested in a creative writing concentration should consult with Prof. Ken Chen or Sarah Hilligoss .

 With the approval of the Chair of the Barnard Department of English, one course based in the literature of a foreign language (in English translation or in the original language) can count as an elective.

 Seniors who wish to substitute an independent study for a senior seminar should consult the Chair of the English Department. Permission is given rarely and only to proposals meeting the criteria specified under the guidelines for ENGL BC3999 Independent Study.

 This is usually written in a creative writing course that is combined with ENGL BC3996 SPECIAL PROJECT IN ENGLISH . In rare cases, the senior project may be written in ENGL BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY .

Film Studies

An English major with a concentration in film studies consists of 11 courses that are a minimum of 38 credits in total. Six of the 11 must be taken at Barnard or Columbia. Students interested in a film studies concentration should consult with Prof. Ross Hamilton .

 Taken in the junior year. All sections of BC3159 (fall semester) are on the Renaissance; all sections of BC3160 (spring semester) are on the Enlightenment. Students may substitute three courses for the two semesters of Colloquium. At least one of these three must cover literature before 1660 (i.e., Medieval or Renaissance); one other must cover literature of the 17th or 18th century (i.e., The Age of Enlightenment); the last can cover either literature before 1660 or literature of the 17th or 18th century. Students may also take one Colloquium and two substitutions, as long as one of the substitutions covers literature of the same period as the Colloquium it replaces. The other substitution may cover either literature of that same time period or literature of the time period of the other Colloquium. In either case, one of the courses used as a substitution for either Colloquium will also count towards satisfying the "before 1900" requirement.  Please note that only one Colloquium substitution may be a Shakespeare course. For further details, refer to the Substitutions tab above.

 Seniors who wish to substitute an independent study for the non-film senior seminar should consult the Chair of the English Department. Permission is given rarely and only to proposals meeting the criteria specified under the guidelines for ENGL BC3999 Independent Study.

An English major with a concentration in theatre consists of 11 courses that are a minimum of 39 credits in total. Six of the 11 must be taken at Barnard or Columbia. Students interested in a theatre concentration should consult with Prof. Patricia Denison or Prof. Pamela Cobrin .

 Seniors who wish to substitute an independent study for a senior seminar should consult the Chair of the English Department. Permission is given rarely and only to proposals meeting the criteria specified under the guidelines for ENGL BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY .

 This may be written in a Barnard senior seminar with a focus on dramatic literature; written in a dramatic literature course that is combined with ENGL BC3996 SPECIAL PROJECT IN ENGLISH ; or, in rare cases, written in ENGL BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY

Requirements for the Minor

A minor consists of at least five English courses that are a minimum of 15 credits in total. Three of the five must be qualifying Barnard or Columbia courses. Please note that Comparative Literature courses cannot count towards the minor.

For a list of "before 1900" courses, refer to the Substitutions tab above.

Colloquia Substitutions Courses in Literature before 1900 Courses in American Literature Substituting with Courses from Other Departments

Colloquia Substitutions

ENGL BC3159 and ENGL BC3160 are required of English majors in the junior year.  All sections of BC3159 (fall semester) are on the literature of the Renaissance; all sections of BC3160 (spring semester) are on the literature of the Enlightenment.

Students may substitute three courses for the two semesters of Colloquium.  At least one of these three must cover literature before 1660 (i.e., Medieval or Renaissance); one other must cover literature of the 17th or 18th century (i.e., The Age of Enlightenment); the last can cover either literature before 1660 or literature of the 17th or 18th century.

Students may also take one Colloquium and two substitutions, as long as one of the substitutions covers literature of the same period as the Colloquium it replaces.  The other substitution may cover either literature of that same time period or literature of the time period of the other Colloquium.

In either case, one of the courses used as a substitute for either the fall or spring Colloquium will also count towards satisfying the "before 1900" requirement.

Please note that only one Colloquium substitution in total may be a Shakespeare course.

To see if other courses may qualify, consult with your major adviser.

Courses which can serve as a Medieval/Renaissance substitution include

Courses which can serve as an age of enlightenment substitution include.

 This course may count as either a Renaissance/Medieval substitution or an Age of Enlightenment substitution. Please note that it cannot simultaneously count for both substitutions.

Courses in Literature Written before 1900

If you have substituted two or three courses for the Colloquium requirement, one of the substitutions will count towards fulfillment of this requirement. To see if a course not listed here may qualify for this requirement, consult your major adviser.

Qualifying courses in literature written before 1900 can include

Courses in american literature.

To see if a course not listed here may qualify for this requirement, consult your major adviser.

Qualifying courses in American literature can include 1

Please note that as ENGL BC3223 NEW YORK IN TEN OBJECTS and ENGL BC3229 AMERICAN LIVES, AMERICAN STORIES are creative writing courses and not literature courses, they cannot count toward the American literature requirement.

Substituting with Courses from Other Departments

ENGL BC3193 CRITICAL WRITING must be taken in the Barnard English Department.  

To Qualify as a Substitution

For a literary period requirement, the substituting course must cover material from the same literary period covered by the course it is replacing, not just include some of that period's material in a larger range of literature.  With the approval of the Chair of the Barnard English Department, one literature course taken outside the department in English translation or in another language can count as an elective.  If your adviser or the Chair is not familiar with the course (even if given at Columbia), you must provide the syllabus.

Please note that the English Department requires that six of the 10 courses required for graduation as an English major be taken at Barnard or Columbia.

Jump to a Category

Writing Creative Writing Film Studies Speech Theatre Literature Senior Seminars Independent Studies Summer Courses Cross-Listed Courses

ENGL BC3101 THE WRITER'S PROCESS. 4.00 points .

Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to Barnard students. Application process and permission of instructor required: https://writing.barnard.edu/become-writing-fellow. Exploration of theory and practice in the teaching of writing, designed for students who plan to become Writing Fellows at Barnard. Students will read current theory and consider current research in the writing process and engage in practical applications in the classroom or in tutoring. The Writer’s Process is only open to those who applied to and were accepted into the Writing Fellows Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major

ENGL BC3102 ACADEMIC WRITING INTENSIVE. 4.00 points .

Academic Writing Intensive is a small, intensive writing course for Barnard students in their second or third year who would benefit from extra writing support. Students attend a weekly seminar, work closely with the instructor on each writing assignment, and meet with an attached Writing Fellow every other week. Readings and assignments focus on transferable writing, revision, and critical thinking skills students can apply to any discipline. Students from across the disciplines are welcome. This course is only offered P/D/F. To be considered for the course, please send a recent writing sample to [email protected], ideally from your First-Year Writing or First-Year Seminar course, or any other writing-intensive humanities or social sciences course at Barnard (no lab reports please)

ENGL BC3103 THE ART OF THE ESSAY. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. NOTE: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. Fall 2022 course description: Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays. Summer 2022 course description: The Art of the Essay is a writing workshop designed to help you contribute meaningfully in public discourse about the issues that matter most to you. You will write three types of essays in this class, all of which will center personal experience as valuable evidence of larger phenomena or patterns. Your essays will build in complexity, as you introduce more types of sources into conversation about your topics as the semester goes on. You will hone your skills of observing, describing, questioning, analyzing, and persuading. You will be challenged to confront complications and to craft nuanced explorations of your topics. We will also regularly read and discuss the work of contemporary published essayists, identifying key writerly moves that you may adapt as you attempt your own essays. You will have many opportunities throughout the semester to brainstorm ideas, receive feedback from me and your peers, and develop and revise your drafts. At the end of the semester, you will choose a publication to which to submit or pitch one or more of your essays

ENGL BC3104 THE ART OF THE ESSAY. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Students who are on the electronic waiting list or who are interested in the class but are not yet registered MUST attend the first day of class. Essay writing above the first-year level. Reading and writing various types of essays to develop one's natural writing voice and craft thoughtful, sophisticated and personal essays

A writing sample is required to apply to all Barnard creative writing courses. As space is limited in creative writing courses, not all students who apply are guaranteed admittance.

Students are unable to self-register for Barnard creative writing courses. Interested students who have submitted writing samples may put the course on their online schedule, which will automatically place them on the wait list. If they are accepted, the instructor will take them off the wait list, but until that time no one is officially registered for the class.

The spring 2024 submission deadline for all creative writing courses is 11:59 pm ET on Wednesday, December 29, 2023. Please see the Applying to Creative Writing Courses page of the English Department website for directions.

Please note: if you are accepted into a creative writing course, attendance at the first meeting of the course is mandatory.  If you do not show up for the first class, your spot may be given to someone else.

ENGL BC3105 FICTION ＆ PERSONAL NARRATIVE. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Short stories and other imaginative and personal writing

ENGL BC3106 FICTION ＆ PERSONAL NARRATIVE. 3.00 points .

ENGL BC3107 INTRODUCTION TO FICTION WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Practice in writing short stories and other forms of fiction with discussion and close analysis in a workshop setting

ENGL BC3108 INTRODUCTION TO FICTION WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this course, we will learn and practice essential concepts and techniques of writing fiction. We’ll break down the elements of the craft—everything from character, setting, and pacing to point of view, syntax, and imagery––and we’ll build an understanding of how stories work. Class time will include exercises and prompts; close reading of a wide range of published stories; discussions of process; and workshops of student stories. Come prepared to work hard, be open, and take risks

ENGL BC3110 INTRODUCTION TO POETRY WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Section 1: Varied assignments designed to confront the difficulties and explore the resources of language through imitation, allusion, free association, revision, and other techniques. Section 2: By exploring a wide variety of contemporary and historical poets, this class will focus on introducing and expanding your knowledge of the art and craft of poetry and offer exemplars for your creativity. Both in-class and take-home exercises offer new ways to use language (diction, syntax) musicality (meter, rhythms, form and style and other devices) to create your own new works

ENGL BC3113 PLAYWRITING I. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. The class will explore a broad range of approaches to playwriting in a workshop setting. Each week, students will write in response to prompts that are designed to explicate different elements and principles of the form. The work will culminate at the end of the semester with the writing of a one act play. Classes will largely be spent reading and discussing students’ work but students will also be choosing from a wide selection of plays to read two each week

ENGL BC3114 PLAYWRITING II. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. What makes a play alive? Often a playwright is surprised into their strongest work. The practices of experimentation and analysis, curiosity and audacity lead to new possibilities. Students will read and respond to plays, identifying elements and strategies, and each week bring in fragments and scenes written in response to weekly prompts. By the middle of the semester, students will choose the piece that feels the most viable and develop it into what in most cases will be a thirty page play. NOTE: Playwriting I ( ENGL BC3113 ) is NOT a prerequisite, and students need not have written a play before

ENGL BC3115 STORY WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. A workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story

ENGL BC3116 STORY WRITING II. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Some experience in writing of fiction. Conference hours to be arranged. Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Advanced workshop in writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction required. Conference hours to be arranged

ENGL BC3117 FICTION WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Assignments designed to examine form and structure in fiction

ENGL BC3118 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. Weekly workshops designed to generate and critique new poetry. Each participant works toward the development of a cohesive collection of poems. Readings in traditional and contemporary poetry will also be included

ENGL BC3125 ADVANCED POETRY WRITING II. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this workshop, we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language– the language of our highest attention and freedom– shared between reader and writer, and consider the metaphysics and motivations for making meaning and making it our own. In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic explorations with others focusing on contemplative practices and our writing process. Readings will range diversely through eras and modes including works, among others, by Sun Buer, Audre Lorde, Hannah Emerson, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Mónica de la Torre

ENGL BC3134 CREATIVE NON-FICTION. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this class, you'll write two personal essays, about fifteen pages each. We'll spend each class discussing two student essays and one published essay. My goal in this class--besides building a community of people to talk about writing together--is for each student to figure out what drives them to write, what they're most driven to write about, and how their mind works. I like to find and bring out each student's strengths as a writer, storyteller, thinker. I'm a comics artist (long-form) and cartoonist (short-form), and I encourage anyone with an interest in making comics or other kinds of visual narratives to do so. I can offer help with very nuts and bolts things like materials and computer programs, as well as help telling a clear story in a sometimes complicated medium. I don't think there are clear, universal boundaries between non-fiction and fiction, personal essay and journalistic essay, fact and story (in a creative writing context, I mean!), long-form and short-form, written word and other modes of communication - and I like for students to start to figure out their own personal differentiations and definitions. Homework for this class is mostly reading. There's also a quick weekly writing assignment, graded pass/fail, just to keep you writing regularly. In our workshops, we go over the essays in draft form. I don't grade the essays until they're officially turned in at the end of the semester

ENGL BC3150 INVENTION, REVISION, AND IMAGINATION. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. A creative writing workshop in fiction, devoted to the imaginative process, and most specifically, to the arts of invention and revision. In addition to considering the wellspring of creative ideas themselves, students will write stories in a variety of lengths—moderate, long, and as short-shorts. Through this process, apprentice writers will become intimate with the most essential aspect of creating imaginative work: the dedication to seeing one’s ideas morph and grow over time

ENGL BC3208 WHAT'S YOUR STORY ANYWAY? - TRAUMA RESISTANCE THROUGH CREATIVE WRITING. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. In this class we will explore the process of healing from trauma through the art of storytelling. We will ground ourselves in the writing of Latina authors whose work demonstrates the resistance from erasure in the United States. The goal of the class is to understand the connection between trauma and healing, through storytelling and creative writing. Moreover, we will develop three pieces of creative non-fiction that will encompass this relationship over the three different lenses of place, person and personal experience

ENGL BC3223 NEW YORK IN TEN OBJECTS. 4.00 points .

"New York in Ten Objects" introduces students to the creative possibilities of the podcast. Drawing on the possibilities of interdisciplinary analysis and creative non-fiction, this course aims to use quotidian objects to critically engage with the city, re-rendering those objects extraordinary and telling untold stories. The starting points for our investigation are ten concrete objects – some iconic, some ironic, but all characteristic of New York City. Beginning with these objects, students will develop projects, in small groups and individually, that connect these objects with a broader societal movement, cultural idea, political cause, or scientific development significant to past or present New York City life. To prepare students to develop their projects in an audio medium, we will first become familiar with a range of current podcasts, and will begin to break down the elements of podcast-storytelling as practiced today. Through workshops with IMATS in a weekly lab session and hands-on experience, students will learn how to collect audio interviews, ambient sound, and to record voice-over narration. Every student will outline their ideas, develop scripts, and produce a podcast by layering and editing their audio files. In the end, this course will investigate how the popular medium of the podcast can serve as a locus of local conversation and public intellectual activity. Students will learn how ordinary objects can breathe life into a story and how audio stories can advance critical analysis. Applications are due by 1 August: https://forms.gle/Gtb5YWgeq59Mnfhy5. Please note that this seminar is limited to 14 students. You will be notified of your acceptance or non-acceptance to the course before the first day of classes. After receiving admittance into the course, you MUST come to the first class to secure your seat

ENGL BC3229 AMERICAN LIVES, AMERICAN STORIES. 3.00 points .

Writing sample required to apply: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses In this class we will discuss the narrative of the "American" story, and how stories of immigrants and minority identities redefine and complicate it. The goal of the class is to investigate how writers frame a sense of identity in relation to the "American ideal". We will explore this theme through three creative non-fiction pieces each focusing on a different perspective of place, person, and personal experience. What are your stories, and what makes them "American"?

ENFL BC3001 BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION. 3.00 points .

Black Speculative Fiction encompasses a whole range of Black subgenres from Science Fiction and Fantasy to Horror and Afrofuturism. For the duration of this course, we will attempt to begin the work of extrapolating the function of Blackness within these various genres—interrogating which syntactical elements are required to label a piece of fiction “Black” and how Blackness informs genre. Through formal analysis of texts and the application of various theories presented in class, we’ll begin to understand how Blackness moves through genre to understand its relationship to the world and in some cases, to the artform itself. We will look at various texts: Film, Television, Prose, and Music. By looking across genres, we will be able to honor the inherent intertextuality of Black work and the constant inter-discursive work done across genre, text, and time. Whether a critique of structural anti-Blackness writ large, an expression of the complexity of the positionality of Black persons, or a statement of the function of Blackness, these texts make a case for the theoretical rigor and provocative discourses that lies at the heart of Black Speculative Fiction

Registration in these courses is limited.

ENGL BC3121 PUBLIC SPEAKING. 3.00 points .

Open only to undergraduates. This course will introduce you to principles of effective public speaking and debate, and provide practical opportunities to use these principles in structured speaking situations. You will craft and deliver speeches, engage in debates and panel discussions, analyze historical and contemporary speakers, and reflect on your own speeches and those of your classmates. You will explore and practice different rhetorical strategies with an emphasis on information, persuasion and argumentation. For each speaking assignment, you will go through the speech-making process, from audience analysis, purpose and organization, to considerations of style and delivery. The key criteria in this course are content, organization, and adaptation to the audience and purpose. While this is primarily a performance course, you will be expected to participate extensively as a listener and critic, as well as a speaker

ENGL BC3123 RHETORICAL CHOICES: PUBLIC SPEAKING. 4.00 points .

Prerequisites: Application process and permission of instructor. Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Enrollment restricted to Barnard students. Application process and instructor permission required: https://speaking.barnard.edu/become-speaking-fellow. Speaking involves a series of rhetorical choices regarding vocal presentation, argument construction, and physical affect that, whether made consciously or by default, project information about the identity of the speaker. In this course students will relate theory to practice: to learn principles of public speaking and speech criticism for the purpose of applying these principles as peer tutors in the Speaking Fellow Program. Note: This course now counts as an elective for the English major

For those interested in doing an English major with a concentration in theatre, please see the course-listed courses section below for the Theatre Department's course descriptions for THTR UN3150 Western Theatre Traditions: Classic to Romantic and THTR UN3151 Western Theatre Traditions: Modern.

ENTH BC3136 SHAKESPEARE IN PERFORMANCE. 4.00 points .

Shakespeare's plays as theatrical events. Differing performance spaces, acting traditions, directorial frames, theatre practices, performance theories, critical studies, cultural codes, and historical conventions promote differing modes of engagement with drama in performance. We will explore Shakespeare's plays in the context of actual and possible performance from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century

ENTH BC3139 MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA ＆ PERFORMANCE. 4.00 points .

Modern American Drama and Performance in an era of cultural contestation. What is united about the United States? How are the important claims of cultural difference related to the intercultural claims of shared community? Is there a place for historical continuity in the modernist pursuit of change? How have these issues been addressed in the emergence and development of modern drama and performance in America? Questions such as these will be addressed in the context of theatrical exploration, performance history, and social change. Canonical and experimental playwrights include Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, and Dominique Morisseau

ENTH BC3141 EARLY 20TH-CENTURY UNITED STATES DRAMA AND PERFORMANCE. 4.00 points .

The beginning of the 20th century in the United States was a time of turbulence: the excitement of a new century mixed with the flurry of voices trying to define “What makes an American, American.” Theatre reflected and inflected discussions, arguments, debates and celebrations of identity and belonging. And, everything was up for debate: morals, religion, sexuality, gender roles, race–all factions clawing towards ideals of citizenship. In this seminar, we will explore early 20th-century American theater as a forum for these debates–plays and performances of all types assert visibility of both issues and bodies, politicizing both in the process. We will begin by looking at the end of the 19th century as the nation engaged with the end of legally enslaving African Americans, the Women’s Suffrage movement gearing up, and the national debates on immigration, morality and religion–and all made their way to the stages of theater and Performance in the United States. Topics in this seminar will include The Harlem Renaissance, The Little Theatre Movement, Comstock/Censorship Laws, Broadway Fare, Popular Entertainment, Female Playwrights, Queer Theatre, Popular Music (to name a few more than “a few”)

ENTH BC3144 Black Theatre. 4 points .

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students.

Exploration of Black Theater, specifically African-American performance traditions, as an intervening agent in racial, cultural, and national identity. African-American theatre artists to be examined include Amiri Baraka, Kia Corthron, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrian Piper, and August Wilson. Fulfills one (of two) required courses in dramatic literature for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major.

ENTH BC3145 EARLY AMERCN DRAMA ＆ PERFRMNC. 4.00 points .

Competing constructions of American identity in the United States date back to the early republic when a newly emerging nation struggled with the questions: What makes an American American? What makes America America? From colonial times forward, the stage has served as a forum to air differing beliefs as well as medium to construct new beliefs about Nation, self and other. The texts we will read, from colonial times through WWI, explore diverse topics such as politics, Native American rights, slavery, labor unrest, gender roles, and a growing immigrant population

ENTH BC3190 Diabolical Drama of the Middle Ages. 3 points .

Hell bursts onto the European stage at the end of the Middle Ages. Satan and his attendant devils, although present in earlier forms of Christian drama, become a defining feature of the dramatizations of Christian history and morality in Late Medieval England. The devils of these plays are disruptive, anarchic, seductive and repulsive. They are rhetorically bewitching and morally dangerous. This course will pay close attention to these devils and their devilry. What do they do? How do they speak? What do they know and what choice do they have in being so diabolical? Rather than viewing devils simply as spiritual antagonists, instead we will investigate them as complex creatures doing serious theological work in the difficult and spiritually tumultuous towns of late medieval England. Through close critical inquiry, contextual reading and some of our own imaginative stagings, we will explore the central role of the "diabolic" in late medieval drama and its sometimes troubling vision of Christian life.

ENGL BC1901 INTRODUCTION TO COMICS ＆ GRAPHIC NOVELS. 3.00 points .

This course provides students with an introduction to the scholarly study of comics and graphic novels. It is designed to teach students how to analyze these texts by paying special attention to narrative forms and page design. As part of this focus, attention will be given to the way that comics and graphic novels are created and the importance of publication format. In addition to studying comics and graphic novels themselves, we will look at the way that scholars have approached this emergent field of academic interest

AFEN BC3009 TONI MORRISON: AN ETHICAL POETICS. 4.00 points .

Toni Morrison set herself a challenge: to engage language in complex literary ways in order to reveal the ‘fact’ of race in the lived experiences of Americans—those made to bear the burden of being ‘raced,’ those exercising the prerogative of ‘racing,’ and those who imagine that none of this applies to them. We travel with her artistic path from The Bluest Eye to her later novels to learn how her choice to create figurative, logical narratives seek their own understanding of the ethics of what she called the “manageable, doable, modern human activity” of living in ‘the house of race.’

ENGL BC3098 THE ENGLISH CONFERENCE. 1.00 point .

The English Conference: The Lucyle Hook Guest Lectureship is a two to four-week course each semester on a special topic presented by a visiting scholar. The series was endowed by a gift from Professor Emerita of English Lucyle Hook to bring our students and faculty the perspective of scholars of literature in English working outside the College community. It can only be taken for pass/fail for 1 point. Students must attend all four class sessions and write a final paper in order to receive credit for this course.To see the dates/times that The English Conference will meet this semester, the current course description, and the biography of the visiting scholar, please visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/english-conference

ENGL BC3130 THE AMERICAN COWBOY AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE WEST. 4 points .

This upper-level research-oriented seminar will study the all-American icon of the cowboy, with its signature embrace of masculinity, stoicism, elegiac music, and love of nature. We will read Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy and other works that emerge from this icon, watch a curated series of cowboy movies, and write critical essays.

AFEN BC3134 UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN. 4.00 points .

How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora

AFEN BC3135 Zora Neale Hurston: A Writing Life. 4.00 points .

On her “Record of Freshman Interest” form, Zora Neale Hurston, Barnard class of 1928, wrote in response to the question of what vocation or profession she had in mind after graduation, “I have had some small success as a writer and wish above all to succeed at it. Either teaching or social work would be interesting, but consolation prizes.” No consolation prize was necessary as Hurston became one of American and African American literature’s finest writers, America’s first Black anthropologist, and a Black feminist ancestor and icon. A deep dive into Hurston’s work and writing life, this course reads Hurston as a narrative stylist and theorist in multiple genres: as poet, essayist, writer of short stories, novelist, playwright, folklorist, and memorist. The goal of this class is to read Hurston closely and widely and to identify and examine her aesthetic philosophy and stylistic choices as one of the first African American women able to have a writing “career.” We will concentrate on her work from the 1920s through the 1930s, when she was at Barnard, and a leading figure in the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance. In her time, Hurston was adamant about writing for and about people like herself; she saw ordinary black people as keepers of a rich culture that should be celebrated and shared. In this spirit, the assignments for this course will lead to final digital projects that can be shared with the Barnard community in anticipation of the centennial of Hurston’s matriculation and graduation from Barnard (1925-1928). We will partner with the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard, as well as Barnard Archives; we will engage resources at Barnard, such as Hurston-focused issues of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and other institutions, such as Columbia’s Rare Book Collection, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library of Congress. No prior experience with digital tools is necessary

ENGL BC3141 MAJOR ENGLISH TEXTS I. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25 students. A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Autumn: Beowulf through Johnson

ENGL BC3142 MAJOR ENGLISH TEXTS II. 3.00 points .

A chronological view of the variety of English literature through study of selected writers and their works. Spring: Romantic poets through the present

ENGL BC3146 Walk This Way. 3 points .

What's in a walk?  This course undertakes an interdisciplinary study of a fundamental human activity, focusing on philosophical and aesthetic treatments of human locomotion.  After first examining the history of walking as a social, economic, religious, and political activity, the course will concentrate on urban walking and how it has been represented in text and image from ancient times to the present.  Topics will include walking as introspection, escape, recreation, and discovery; walking and gender; the psychogeography of walking, walking in the city, etc.  Readings from Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Thoreau, Whitman, Joyce, Woolf, O'Hara, De Certeau, and many others.  Images from film, painting, and photography to be provided by student research.  Ditto for musical strolls.

ENGL BC3147 Introduction to Narrative Medicine. 4 points .

Prerequisites: Post-bacc students require instructor permission.

Narrative Medicine was designed to give doctors and healthcare professionals a more profound understanding of, and empathy for, the experience of illness. It teaches how to listen and what to listen for. While the skills developed are directly applicable to the practice of medicine, they are also important in any field in which human relationships are central: business, law, architecture, social work, and the creative arts. The multidisciplinary course entails a rigorous integration of didactic and experiential methodology to develop a heightened awareness of self and others and build a practical set of narrative competencies.

ENGL BC3151 Bad Feelings: The Uses of Literature in Difficult Times. 4 points .

This course will explore the purposes of literary study--and, by extension, humanistic education--during periods of turmoil. Working in sustained dialogue with one another, we will explore the treatment of emotions such as despair, anxiety, loss, fury & ecstasy in a wide variety of literary texts, ranging from literature that is ancient (e.g., Sophocles, Euripides) to early modern (William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish) to modern (Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Elena Ferrante). In the process, we will explore various schools of critical theory, such as Aristotle’s  Poetics  (including the ancient theory of catharsis), psychoanalysis, and feminism, in a context where the stakes of these intellectual traditions will come to the fore. ​

ENGL BC3154 Chaucer Before Canterbury. 3 points .

Chaucer's innovations with major medieval forms: lyric, the extraordinary dream visions, and the culmination of medieval romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Approaches through close analysis, and feminist and historicist interpretation. Background readings in medieval life and culture.

ENGL BC3155 THE CANTERBURY TALES. 3.00 points .

Chaucer as inheritor of late-antique and medieval conventions and founder of early modern literature and the fiction of character. Selections from related medieval texts

ENGL BC3159 THE ENGLISH COLLOQUIUM. 4.00 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Renaissance colloquium we will examine English and European imaginative and intellectual life from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Defined by humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and revolution, this was a period of ideological struggle on many levels. Long-held ways of ordering the world came under increasing strain-and sometimes ruptured irreparably. Writers discussed and debated the aims of human knowledge, retooled old literary forms for new purposes, scrambled to take account of an expanded awareness of the globe, and probed the tension between belief and doubt. Throughout this process, they experimented with new literary styles to express their rapidly changing worldviews. This is an intensive course in which we will take multiple approaches to a variety of authors that may include Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Behn, among others

ENGL BC3160 THE ENGLISH COLLOQUIUM. 4.00 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to Barnard English majors. In the Enlightenment colloquium we will look at English and European imaginative and intellectual life during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, writers tried in new ways to reconcile the tensions between reason and religion. Categories of thought that underlie our world today were taking shape: secularity, progress, the public and the private, individual rights, religious tolerance. Writers articulated principles of equality in an era of slavery. Literary forms like the novel, which emerges into prominence during this period, express in irreducibly complex ways these and other changes. In this intensive course, we will study from multiple angles a variety of authors that may include Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Spinoza, Lafayette, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Voltaire, Fielding, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, and Wollstonecraft, among others

ENGL BC3162 DONNE, THE METAPHYSICALS, AND HIS LEGACY. 3.00 points .

John Donne is the most famous “Metaphysical Poet” of the 17th century. The term “metaphysical” to refer to his poetry was first used by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. It was popularized in the 20th century by T. S. Eliot, who lamented what he called a “dissociation of sensibility” that set in during the 17th century, whereas (Eliot said) “a thought to Donne was an experience,” as if mind was not simply a separate thing from embodied experience. Donne’s poetry has long been admired, indeed loved, embraced by later readers, writers, and artists—not just in England and America but in different parts of the world. He has left a rich legacy, and what Judith Scherer Herz calls his “voiceprint” on diverse later writers. In my experience, students always want to spend more time on Donne. In this course, we will do that, reading his poetry with attention but also his prose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written in 1623 during the plague when he came close to dying. The Devotions found a new life during the AIDs crisis, and then again during our Covid pandemic. The line from the Devotions that begins “No man is an island” has been part of our culture for a century, though many have no idea where it comes from. In this course, we will engage in “attentive,” patient reading of his texts, entering in them, trying to figuring them out, much as Donne sought to figure out lived experience in richly metaphorical writing. Though Donne is at the center of the course, we will also read a selection of poems by other 17th-century Metaphysical poets—George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell—and Sir Thomas Browne’s prose Hydriotaphia: Or Urn Burial, occasioned by the excavation of ancient burial urns discovered in Norwich. Browne tries to figure out the identity of these urns, then moves to a fascinating survey of the burial practices of different cultures over a long period of time, and then concludes with a profound meditation on memory, legacy, and our desire for immortality, perpetuating our earthly connections. Donne left an impression on so many writers such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney; Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; Djuna Barnes (her novel Nightwood, a lesbian classic), Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht, the Bengali Rabinadrath Tagore; Joseph Brodsky, Yehudah Amichai and Leonard Cohen; Linda Gregerson, and Kimberly Johnson. So many possibilities for anyone interested in exploring beyond the limits of syllabus. Donne’s poetry has had (and continues to have) a transhistorical and transcultural currency. This course begins to opening up possibilities, as we think about how and why we read imaginative literature from the past

ENGL BC3163 SHAKESPEARE I. 3.00 points .

A critical and historical introduction to Shakespeares comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163 : Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164 : Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order

ENGL BC3164 SHAKESPEARE II. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 60 students. Critical and historical introduction to selected comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances by Shakespeare. Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3163 : Shakespeare I and ENGL BC3164 : Shakespeare II in sequence; you may take them in any order

ENGL BC3165 The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Complete Nondramatic Poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare. 3 points .

In this course, we will read the complete nondramatic poetry of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, working closely through sonnets, epyllia (mini epics), and translations. How do Marlowe and Shakespeare put into play inherited and new ideas about history, gender, sexuality, politics, law, God, race, matter, print, and literary form (especially the sonnet)?

ENGL BC3166 17TH-CENTURY PROSE ＆ POETRY. 3 points .

The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of Devotions grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natural world and friendship (Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Henry Vaughan). Robert Burton wrote a book on melancholy, which he kept adding to. Francis Bacon thought a revolution in science could redeem the world. Thomas Browne, a physician as well as writer, tackled the problem of intolerance and religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes thought only a firm (authoritarian?) government could reestablish peace and security, while Gerard Winstanley (a “Leveller”) thought that owning land (and money) was the source of all war and misery. Transgressive women had their own ideas. The Quaker leader Margaret Fell defended women's right to preach. We will read selections from these and other writers, understanding them in their historical context and with a sense of their current resonance.The seventeenth century was a century of revolution, giving birth to modern ways of thinking, and calling into question many of the old ways. In the early years, many were affected by melancholy, some believing the world was approaching the endtimes. England experienced plagues, particularly in London, and other catastrophes. So we might find some affinity with our own current situation, facing new challenges, our world turned upside down, which is what many people felt during that time. Out of all of this turmoil, however, came great literature including lyric poems by John Donne and others exploring love and desire, doubt and faith, sex and God. Donne also wrote a series of Devotions grappling with mortality over a course of 23 days when he was suffering from typhus or relapsing fever and almost died. Others turned to find solace in the natural world and friendship (Amelia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, Henry Vaughan). Robert Burton wrote a book on melancholy, which he kept adding to. Francis Bacon thought a revolution in science could redeem the world. Thomas Browne, a physician as well as writer, tackled the problem of intolerance and religious conflict. Thomas Hobbes thought only a firm (authoritarian?) government could reestablish peace and security, while Gerard Winstanley (a “Leveller”) thought that owning land (and money) was the source of all war and misery. Transgressive women had their own ideas. The Quaker leader Margaret Fell defended women's right to preach. We will read selections from these and other writers, understanding them in their historical context and with a sense of their current resonance.

ENGL BC3167 MILTON. 3.00 points .

How and why might we read Milton now? And how do his writings and thinking intersect with issues in our present moment? We will read his influential epic Paradise Lost after reading selections of Milton's earlier poetry and prose (attack against censorship, defenses of divorce, individual conscience, toleration, complicated issues of political and religious liberty). He wrote about these matters as he was involved in the English Civil war, an advocate of liberty (we will consider what kind, for whom?) and revolution, which Americans would embrace as inspiration and to justify the American Revolution. We will critically read Milton’s literary and political texts within the contexts of religious, political, and cultural history of early modern England and Europe but also colonial and revolutionary America—asking difficult questions, and with a sense of how Milton’s writing connects to present issues of our time

ENGL BC3169 Renaissance Drama. 3 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 25 students.

This class will examine English drama at the moment when it arose as a major art form. In Renaissance London, astonishingly complex plays emerged that reflected the diverse urban life of the city, as well as the layered and often contradictory inner life of the individual. This poetically rich theater was less concerned with presenting answers, and more with staging questions—about gender, race, religion, literary tradition, love, sex, authority, and class. In this course, we will try to tap into this theater’s cosmopolitan, enlivened poetics by studying not only Shakespeare, but also the various other major authors who constituted this literary world: Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and the female playwright Aphra Behn.

ENGL BC3170 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1600-1800. 3.00 points .

The "Scientific Revolution" began in England in the early seventeenth century, with the experiments of John Dee and the reforming projects of Francis Bacon, to culminate in Isaac Newton’s discovery of the natural laws of motion. This was also a period of great literary innovation, from Shakespeare’s plays and the metaphysical poetry of Marvell and Donne, to the new genre of the novel. This course will explore both the scientific and literary "revolutions" – indeed we will attempt to put them in a kind of conversation with one another, as poets and scientists puzzled over the nature of spirit, body, and the world

ENGL BC3171 LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS. 3.00 points .

Love him or hate him—or both, as is more often and more fittingly the case—you must admit that Freud turned the world upside-down. Against the supposed supremacy of rational consciousness, he found the power of the unconscious. At the heart of civilized order, he uncovered ever more sophisticated mechanisms of repression. Where the world saw the march of progress, he saw the death drive. And he discovered all of this through a new invention, a science of narrative, called psychoanalysis. According to this science, we are the stories we tell. And this means that we, our lives, our joys and anxieties, our past and our future, are like any story: always open to interpretation. In this course, we turn this lens back upon psychoanalysis, opening its clinical history and fundamental concepts to critical, literary interpretation. Beginning with Freud but moving beyond him, we will read foundational psychoanalytic texts alongside plays, poetry, novels, short stories, and films that corroborate, complicate, and contest the Freudian framework. We will consider the intrinsically literary qualities of psychoanalysis and, inversely, we will ask what literature, literary criticism, and literary theory gain or lose in this critical relation to psychoanalysis

ENGL BC3173 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL. 3.00 points .

In the seventeenth century, a new genre appears across Europe: the novel. Why does it appear? What accounts for its increasing popularity across the eighteenth century? What role does it play, in personal psychology as well as society? To puzzle these questions, we will place the development of the novel within the history of art, philosophy and science, as well as psychology and literary theory. Readings may include novels by Mme. de La Fayette, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, the Marquis de Sade, William Godwin, and Jane Austen, as well as essays by Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Elias, Moretti, and others

ENGL BC3174 The Age of Johnson. 3 points .

The works of Johnson, Boswell, and their contemporaries in historic context; rise of the novel (Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne); poets from Pope to Blake and Wordsworth; women writers from Carter to Collier to Wollstonecraft; working class writers; topics include slavery and abolition in literature, the democratization of culture, and the transition to romanticism.

ENGL BC3176 The Romantic Era. 3 points .

Romantic writers in their intellectual, historical, and political context, with reference to contemporary movements in philosophy, music, and the plastic arts. Authors include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats. An emphasis on close reading of the poetry.

ENGL BC3177 VICTORIAN AGE IN LITERATURE. 3.00 points .

“We have become a novel-reading people,” wrote Anthony Trollope in 1870. “Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid.” This course will consider why the novel was so important to Victorian culture and society. What made the Victorian novel such a fertile form for grappling with the unprecedented cultural changes of the nineteenth century? To address this question, we will explore how Victorian novels both responded to, and participated in, major social and cultural shifts of the period, including industrialism and urbanization; colonialism and empire; the changing status of women, sexuality, and marriage; the emergence of Darwinism; class conflict and social reform; and the expansion of education and literacy. This course will also consider more broadly what novels are for, and what the Victorians thought they were for. Do novels represent the world as it really is, or do they imagine it as it ought to be? What kinds of solutions to social and political problems can novels offer? Can novels ethically improve (or corrupt) their readers? We will consider these issues in the context of realism, Victorian literature’s trademark genre, but we’ll also explore an array of other genres, such as the industrial novel, the Bildungsroman, the sensation novel, detective fiction, and gothic fiction. Authors include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and others

ENGL BC3178 Victorian Poetry and Criticism. 3 points .

Poetry, art, and aesthetics in an industrial society, with emphasis on the role of women as artists and objects. Poems by Tennyson, Arnold, Christina and D.G. Rossetti, Swinburne, and Elizabeth and Robert Browning; criticism by Ruskin, Arnold, and Wilde; paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Whistler; photographs by J.M. Cameron.

ENGL BC3179 AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1800. 3.00 points .

This course surveys American literature written before 1800. While we will devote some attention to the literary traditions that preceded British colonization, most of our readings will be of texts written in English between 1620 and 1800. These texts--histories, autobiographies, poems, plays, and novels--illuminate the complexity of this period of American culture. They tell stories of pilgrimage, colonization, and genocide; private piety and public life; manuscript and print publication; the growth of national identity (political, cultural, and literary); Puritanism, Quakerism, and Deism; race and gender; slavery and the beginnings of a movement towards its abolition. We will consider, as we read, the ways that these stories overlap and interconnect, and the ways that they shape texts of different periods and genres

ENGL BC3180 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1800-1870. 3.00 points .

Texts from the late Republican period through the Civil War explore a range of intersecting literary, political, philosophical, and theological issues, including the literary implications of American independence, the status of Native Americans, the nature of the self, slavery and abolition, gender and woman's sphere, and the Civil War. Writers include Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson

ENGL BC3181 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1871-1945. 3.00 points .

This interdisciplinary course situates late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature within the context of historical and cultural change. Students read works by Whitman, Twain, James, Griggs, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hurston alongside political and cultural materials including Supreme Court decisions, geometric treatises, composite photography and taxidermy

ENGL BC3183 AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1945. 3.00 points .

In the wake of World War II, the so-called American Century rises out of the ashes of fascism, haunted by the specter of bombs blurring the boundary between victory and defeat. An ideological civil war ensues, punctuated by literary resistance to grand narratives and their discontents. Authors include Ellison, O’Connor, Ginsberg, Bishop, Pynchon, Robinson, Merrill, Morrison, Didion, and Wallace

ENGL BC3185 Modern British and American Poetry. 3 points .

Poetry written in English during the past century, discussed in the context of modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, and changing social and technological developments.  Students will participate in shaping the syllabus and leading class discussion.  Authors may include Yeats, Williams, Eliot, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Ginsberg, Stevens, O' Hara, Plath, Brooks, Jordan, Walcott, Alexie, and many others.

ENGL BC3188 The Modern Novel. 3 points .

Examines formal changes in the novel from nineteenth-century realism to stream of consciousness, montage, and other modernist innovations. Social and historical contexts include World War I, urbanization, sexuality and the family, empire and colonialism. Works of Henry James, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce.

ENGL BC3189 POSTMODERNISM. 3.00 points .

This course considers how Postmodernisms profound distrust of language and narrative transforms the form and function of literature. Writers include Stoppard, Pynchon, Didion, Morrison, Robinson, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Wallace, Ashbery, and Hejinian

ENGL BC3192 ESTRANGEMNT/EXILE GLOB NOVELS. 4.00 points .

“...but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.” Charlotte Brontë on her late sister the novelist Emily Brontë. This course examines the development of literary fiction in response to history. Through a diverse selection of books—novels, novellas, and verse—spanning nearly 2400 years, we will investigate the seemingly contradictory condition of the author as both outsider and insider. We will look at how writers from various backgrounds have addressed social and political alienation, national and personal crisis, through narrative. The uniqueness of the texts lies not just in how implicated they are in history, but in their resistance against generalization and intolerance. Two areas of critical concern govern the selection: Romanticism brings to focus responses to estrangement and injustice; and Modernism is seen as individual expression to alienation and exile. However, implicit also is the desire to complicate the distinction between those two schools. What unites these concerns, however, is how our writers’ artistic commitment, as both witnesses and participants, creates an opportunity for literature to reveal more than the author intends and, on the other hand, more than what power desires

ENGL BC3193 CRITICAL WRITING. 4.00 points .

(Formerly called Literary Criticism - Theory.) Provides experience in the reading and analysis of literary texts and some knowledge of conspicuous works of literary criticism. Frequent short papers. Required of all English majors before the end of the junior year. Sophomores are encouraged to take it in the spring semester even before officially declaring their major. Transfer students should plan to take it in the fall semester

ENGL BC3194 LITERARY THEORY. 4.00 points .

In this course, we will trace the complex category of imitation from its ancient roots to some of its modern theoretical and literary manifestations. Interpreted differently by different thinkers, imitation can refer to the problem of art’s imitation of things in the world (e.g., your portrait looks like you), art’s imitation of other artistic works (e.g., your portrait looks like a Rembrandt), people’s imitation or even mimicry of one another (who does she think she is?). The latter form of imitation raises the most overtly socio-political questions, whether by replicating social power structures in order to “pass” in a potentially hostile environment or by subverting these same structures through mimicking, outwitting, critiquing, or mocking them. At its core, the category of imitation focuses our attention on what is so central to artmaking that it almost eludes our notice: the question of resemblance. Put in its simplest form: What are we doing (philosophically, artistically, socially) when we make one thing resemble another?

ENGL BC3195 MODERNISM. 3.00 points .

A deeply ambivalent, transatlantic movement, Modernism grapples with revolutionary forces that defy traditional structures: the 19th-century Darwinian inversion to the old idea of order, the advent of psychoanalysis, the crisis of world war, and the anxiety and exuberance of shifting gender paradigms. The ensuing cultural upheaval dis-orders not only the content but also the literary forms of Modernism, giving rise to abstraction, fragmented narrative structures, stream-of-consciousness prose and the extreme erudition T.S. Eliot “shored against [the] ruins” of so-called civilization in “The Waste Land.” Special attention will be devoted to how seminal manifestos, most notably "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and A Room of One's Own, frame the movement's embattled aesthetics. Works by Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats

AFEN BC3196 HARLEM RENAISSANCE LITERATURE. 4.00 points .

Home to Harlem focuses on the relationship between art, activism and social justice during the Harlem/ New Negro Renaissance. Exploring the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated Harlem in 1920s to 1930s, the course discusses the politics of literary and theatrical production, while exploring the fashioning and performance of New Negro identity through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork. Topics considered include: role of Africa/slavery/the south in New Negro expression, patronage, passing, primitivism/popular culture, black dialect as literary language, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin

ENGL BC3204 WORLD LITERATURE REVISITED. 3.00 points .

As a discipline, World Literature dates back to the early 19 th century and Goethe’s concept of weltliteratur. Yet, despite the fact that Goethe was well-versed in the literature of the “Orient” and emphasized their centrality in weltliteratur, the languages that he spoke of and underlined within the formation of this literature were mostly German and Romance languages. Institutionally speaking, not much has changed over the past couple of centuries. More often than not, studying the literature of locations such as the Middle East, Africa, and East and Southeast Asia takes place in Area Studies departments, and offerings of these areas’ literatures even in Comparative Literature departments are few and far in between. This course looks at a sample of texts that might be studied within the rubric of World Literature in an English department. We will examine foundational genres in English literary studies, such as epic and lyric poetry and free verse, dramatic literature, and the novel, and study variations of these genres in other literary traditions. Given that we’re reading many of the texts in translation, the issue of translating literary texts into English is a central component of our discussion. Specifically, we will think about the role that translation plays in the production and politics of World Literature and how the issue of translation differentiates between the disciplines of Comparative Literature and World Literature. We will also study adaptations of and artistic responses to canonical works. Some questions we will tackle include: What/where/whom constitutes the world in World Literature? Traditionally, why have some types of writing and inscription been privileged over others when determining the category of literature? How do we read similarities and differences in the texts while placing them in their particular contexts and histories?

ENGL BC3205 WORLD LITERATURE REVISITED II. 3.00 points .

(Please note that you do not need to take ENGL BC3204 World Literature Revisited I and ENGL BC3205 World Literature Revisited II in sequence; you may take them in any order.) As a discipline, World Literature dates back to the early 19th century and Goethe’s concept of weltliteratur. Yet, despite the fact that Goethe was well-versed in the literature of the “Orient” and he emphasized their centrality in weltliteratur, the languages that he spoke of and underlined within the formation of this literature were mostly German and Romance languages. Institutionally speaking, not much has changed over the past couple of centuries. More often than not, studying the literature of locations such as the Middle East, Africa, or East Asia takes place in Area Studies departments, and offerings of these areas’ literatures in Comparative Literature departments are few and far in between. In World Literature Revisited I, we imagined what a survey of World Literature in a literary studies department could look like, as we dealt with ancient texts until around the 14th century, with a focus on origin stories and epic narratives, lyric poetry, historical narratives, and sacred/religious texts. In World Literature Revisited II, we will continue to investigate and challenge the categories of “Eastern” and “Western” literature and think through the categories of “world” and “literature” in the course title. In this part of the course, we will work on (classical, early modern, and modern) drama, modern poetry, and the novel, with a particular focus on reading in comparison adaptations, appropriations, and literary responses. What/where/whom constitutes the world in World Literature? How can we read and trace literary influence across these literatures without reducing them to a mere repetition of the same themes and ideas? Finally, we will think about the role that translation plays in the production and politics of World Literature, particularly when it comes to adaptations and appropriations, and how the issue of translation differentiates between the disciplines of Comparative Literature and World Literature

ENGL BC3207 THE 'GLOBAL' NOVEL. 3.00 points .

"Yes, globalization can produce homogeneity, but globalization is also a threat to homogeneity." --Kwame Anthony Appiah, "The Case for Contamination," New York Times Magazine, 2006 Thinking through the arguments both in favor of and against globalization, particularly in the realm of cultural productions, in this course we will discuss the "global" novel. To that end, we will read essays from The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century about works such as Americanah, Snow, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (along with the novels themselves) to investigate what is meant by "global" and what the criteria for including novels in this categorization are. We will also consider whether there is an erasure of cultural difference and nuance in reading novels using a globalizing perspective in order to render them more approachable for a (primarily) US audience. In order to think through and challenge this category of the global, we will also read novels that can be roughly categorized as postcolonial. We will thus consider how struggles for independence and the desire to locate one’s identity either within freshly liberated nation-states or in the process of immigrating to former metropoles could give rise to cultural and psychological anxieties. We will also consider the manner in which late-stage capitalism could indeed push toward homogenized senses of self that manifest in a category such as the "global novel" and whether arguments could be made in favor of such homogenization. Ultimately, we will think about the politics of globalization and the desire to include in or exclude from the “global” certain locations, cultural products, or peoples

ENGL BC3214 LATINX AND THE ICE/PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX - ACCESS AND STRATEGIES FOR NEWS COVERAGE. 4.00 points .

This course encompasses themes of race, ethnicity, mass incarceration, and immigration in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will consider the roles of journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives in shaping public policy and attitudes towards lives behind bars. Guest speakers will also provide personal experiences to help reframe our own narratives and perspectives on these issues. The course’s primary goal is to challenge the process of how stories of race, immigration, and mass incarceration are written, by developing scholarly pieces

ENGL BC3215 VICTORIAN SCIENCE＆SCIFI. 3.00 points .

Although Victorian fiction is best known today for its realist commitment to representing the world “as it really is,” especially in genres such as the courtship novel and the Bildungsroman, Victorian novelists also wrote during an age of enthusiastic scientific inquiry that questioned and revised the very fabric of the reality that realist genres purported to represent. This course will accordingly explore the more adventurous and speculative fiction of the Victorian period that was most closely attuned to these new ways of representing and thinking about reality. How did new scientific developments such as evolutionary theory in biology, and the atomic theory in physics, reshape how writers viewed the relationships between human and animal, self and other, space and time, body and mind? How did departing from traditional realist modes enable Victorian science fiction writers to explore the ethical, social, and political implications of scientific theories in ways that scientific prose may not have envisioned? In this course we will read major works of Victorian fiction, by such authors as Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, alongside selections of scientific prose in such fields of Victorian science as biology, physics, mathematics, anthropology, and psychology. Throughout the course, we will understand “science” to include both major developments in the history of science, such as the emergence of evolutionary thought, as well as more eccentric Victorian areas of inquiry, such as phrenology, mesmerism, telepathy, and degeneration. The first three units into which the course is divided each explore a major field of Victorian science alongside a major conceptual category that it challenged and altered: biology and the nature of the human; psychology and the constitution of the self; the physical sciences and the nature of space and time. In each unit, we will investigate how writers’ engagements with these conceptual questions led them to experiment with literary categories such as character, narration, and plot. The course will close with a unit on texts that more broadly address Victorian conceptions of progress, technology, and development. In addition to these specific thematic and formal questions, we will think broadly about how the Victorians understood the value of science and technology in relation to the arts and to literature, and ask what their answers to these questions can offer us as we navigate similar questions today. What does scientific thinking offer to literature, and what kinds of questions can literature answer that scientific prose cannot? Do technological and scientific progress open up utopian vistas for humanity’s future, or are they more likely to lead to dystopian nightmares? Throughout the course, we will explore the resources that the literary imagination offers for thinking through the social consequences of scientific theories.

ENGL BC3218 THE 'ETHNIC' IN THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE. 3 points .

This course proposes to examine the implications of what Trinh T. Minh-Ha has called "specialness," or the distinctiveness of "ethnic" or "third world" experience, as it is represented and consumed in the literary marketplace (including classes like this one). That consumption has a discourse of its own, centered on often conflicting demands for authenticity. The test of authenticity for one reading community might be a book's perceived difference from that community's own experience; for another community (usually the one the author is perceived as coming from), the same book must represent a familiar experience to pass the test. Some questions we will address: How might "ethnic" writing and production both expose itself to and insulate itself from critique via claims to authenticity? How does an author negotiate others' demands for a certain kind of authenticity, and his or her own deeply felt (authentic?) need to consolidate identity by returning to ethnic “origins”? What in a set of publisher’s or reader’s demands for the “real” form or shape what we determine to be “fake”? We will study the primary texts in the context of mainstream literary reviews and other theoretical/polemical statements concerning the “meaning” of ethnic experience. Authors studied may include: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Rodriguez, Ishmael Reed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Jeanine Cummins, and Trinh Minh-Ha.

ENGL BC3242 ANTI-COLONIAL LITERATURE BEFORE 1900. 4.00 points .

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” wrote the abolitionist writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper a few years after the Civil War. This course explores the creative productions, critiques, and political projects of colonized people themselves, specifically focusing on writers in the indigenous, African American, and global anti-imperialist traditions. How did these heterogeneous communities differently diagnose the context of colonialism? What positive horizons of freedom, equality, and democracy did they aspire towards? What do their works tell us about gender, land, and labor? We explore themes of sovereignty against settler colonialism in the work of indigenous writers like Kandiaronk, William Apess, E. Pauline Johnson, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala Sa, and Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii. Next, we read the African American abolitionist tradition, beginning with Phillis Wheatley and slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs) followed by works by Harriet Wilson, Ida B. Wells, and Machado de Assis. The final third of the class will focus on works by those encountering imperialism in Egypt, South Asia, Latin America, the Philippines, and China: Al-Jabarti, Dinabandhu Mitra, José Martí, Jose Rizal, Huang Zunxian, and Qiu Jin

ENGL BC3243 ABSENT MOTHERS, WICKED STEPMOTHERS. 4.00 points .

Why are stepmothers and stepdaughters inevitable enemies in folk and fairy tales? Why are fathers blameless and biological mothers absent (and usually dead)? And how do these narratives, so deeply woven into our own media and language, affect our sense of our own lived reality? In this course, we’ll untangle the complicated web of relationships between mothers, daughters, and stepmothers in folk and fairy tales, from ancient Rome to current cinema. We’ll read analytic psychology, feminist literary theory, cultural history, and other critical perspectives to help us analyze the absent mother, virginal daughter, hapless father, and evil stepmother tropes across time and space, so we can defamiliarize these familiar figures and develop a deeper understanding of how and why they dominate the popular imagination. This is an upper-level course, with priority for juniors and seniors

ENGL BC3244 PROUST: SWANN’S WAY. 4.00 points .

This class is organised around one book, Swann’s Way, volume one of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, a work that is central to the history of the novel. Due to the length and complexity of the six volumes that make up In Search of Lost Time, it is not a novel that benefits from a schematic reading. It calls, instead, on our attention to be paid in an unusually close manner. It is a novel that is committed to the details, to close observation and the expansive and meditative nature of the life of the mind. Therefore, as well as being about Proust’s work, the class is also concerned with questions of attention. As Adorno argued, In Search of Lost Time is a book that is “against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above…” Students will get a chance to read Swann’s Way—a book that is just under 500 pages long—in great depth over the course of the semester. And because the adjective “Proustian”, it could be argued, has come to refer to works that have both succeeded as well as preceded Proust himself, students will be introduced to works by authors who might have influenced Proust — such as: Baudelaire, Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson — as well as examples of writers who had been inspired by Proust’s work — such as: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Javier Marias, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. Creative and analytic close reading will be the primary tool of analysis

ENGL BC3246 WRITING THE MEDIEVAL SELF. 3.00 points .

The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance saw an explosion in the use of the first-person singular "I" by European writers of narrative texts. Although these narratives – among them dream visions, philosophical allegories, spiritual autobiographies, and straight-up novels – do not always correspond to modern ideas about autobiography, they nonetheless demonstrate a growing interest in such "autobiographical" topics as personal identity, sexual difference, mental illness, and disability, even as they experiment with a variety of literary forms and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between truth and writing. Writers will include Augustine, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pisan, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich and Teresa de Cartagena, among others. No foreign language experience is required for this course, but knowledge of Latin or Romance languages may be useful

ENGL BC3249 THE MARRIAGE PLOT. 4.00 points .

This upper-level research-oriented seminar will engage with literary expressions of the universally interesting topic of marriage. Tony Tanner in his famous Adultery in the Novel characterizes marriage as “the structure which supports all structure.” Contemporary critics have seen marriage as essential to maintaining the “family values” of the bourgeoisie; feminists and Marxists have challenged the economic assumptions of patriarchally-defined marriage. Folklorists have treated marriage as the endpoint of the search for a safe domestic space. Starting in ancient times with classic fairy tales and the Hebrew Bible, moving on to a famous medieval poem, a medieval memoir, and three nineteenth-century novels, we will encounter cultural expressions which address intimate partnerships with an emphasis on marriage as a defining condition

ENGL BC3250 INTRODUCTION TO US LATINX LITERATURE. 3.00 points .

This course introduces students to a growing body of work by Latina and Latino writers in the United States, and engages with the critical tools necessary for analyzing a field of inquiry and practice that continues to reframe itself, right down to the label "Latinx." What does that name include, and what does it exclude, in cultural productions born of conflicts of origin, language, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality? For some understanding of context, we will turn to the history and pressures of transnational migration, exile, assimilation, bilingualism and queerness as these variously affect the means and modes of the literary productions with which we're concerned. At the same time, the course will emphasize the invented and hybrid nature of Latinx literary and cultural traditions, and it will investigate the place of those inventions in the larger framework of American intellectual and literary traditions. Readings will be drawn from work written primarily in English, but we will also consider graphic novels, Latinx performance, and works in translation

ENGL BC3251 NINETEENTH-CENTURY THRILLERS. 4.00 points .

This class will investigate the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel is shaped by the forces of horror, sensation, suspense and the supernatural. We will ask how the melodramatic imagination, the rhetoric of monstrosity, and the procedures of detection mark high narrative realism with the signs of cultural anxieties building up around nineteenth-century revolution, industrialization, capitalism, bigamy, Catholicism and immigration. Looking at representative samples of the Romantic neo-gothic novel, mid-century ghost stories, the highly popular and controversial sensation novels of the 1860’s along with their spectacular iterations on the Victorian stage, we will come away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the intersection between the novel and popular entertainment. Readings will probably include Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Brontë’s Villette, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Collins’s The Woman in White, Dickens’s Bleak House, Stoker’s Dracula, plays by Boucicault, Hazelwood, Lewis, and Wood, and ghost stories by Edwards, Gaskell, Hood, and Mulock

ENGL BC3252 CONTEMPORARY MEDIA THEORY. 4.00 points .

Sophomore standing required. Attend first class for instructor permission. Registering for the course only through Student Planning or SSOL will NOT ensure your enrollment. Explores the transformation of sociality, consciousness and geo-politics by and as media technologies during the long 20th century. Students will read influential works of media analysis written during the past century, analyze audio-visual analog and digital media, and explore political theory and media theory written since the rise of the internet. Final projects on contemporary media forms

AFEN BC3253 BEFORE 'BLACK LIVES MATTER':READING INSU. 4.00 points .

Black Lives Matter is an American phenomenon. This course situates BLM in relation to other and earlier movements in the Global South and elsewhere. Through textual analysis and critical reading, we take up the discursive, rhetorical, and poetical strategies of opposition to marginalization, criminalization, and racial othering

ENGL BC3281 ILLEGAL IS NOT A NOUN: DISRUPTING NARRATIVES OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE. 4.00 points .

This course engages with narratives about detention and deportation in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will analyze how journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives shape public policy and American attitudes about the "the immigrant experience." What are these narratives, how are they told, and what are their implications? How do writers disrupt these narratives? We will develop four scholarly essays over the course of the semester to investigate these questions

ENGL BC3288 ROMANCE. 3.00 points .

The literary mode we call “romance” has been enormously popular and influential from its origins in Hellenistic antiquity to current science fiction, and at all levels of textual ambition from popular culture to canonical literature. Within this mass of material, one constant element is romance’s encounter with boundaries. This course will explore such boundary moments in texts from the 5th to the 20th centuries: boundaries and transgressions of desire (romances of marriage and adultery), of time (the reimagining of antiquity), of national foundation, of geography (settings in a fantasy east), of gender, and of class, indeed the boundary of the human and the monstrous

ENGL BC3291 FICTIONS OF LAW AND CUSTOM: WHITENESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE. 3.00 points .

This course examines "white" American identity as a cultural location and set of discourses and traditions with a history—in Mark Twain’s terms, "a fiction of law and custom." What are the origins of "Anglo-Saxon" American identity? What are the borders, visible and invisible, against which this identity has leveraged position and power? How have these borders shifted over time, and in social and cultural space? How has whiteness located itself at the center of political, historical, social and literary discourse, and how has it been displaced? How does whiteness mark itself, or mask itself, in literature and in larger cultural practices? What does whiteness look like, sound like, and feel like from the perspective of the racial "other"? And in what ways do considerations of gender and class complicate these other questions?

ENGL BC3292 QNYC. 3 points .

The cultural history of New York City is inextricable from the history of LGBTQI+ life. American poetry, theatre, ballet, opera, and visual art would be unrecognizable if New York had not been a hub for LGBTQI+ people. In this sprawling city, life could be characterized equally by its anonymity as by the sometimes exacting bonds of its many tight-knit sub-communities. This course will provide a survey of LGBTQI+ literature and some related arts based in the city, starting in the colonial era and extending to the present day.

ENGL BC3294 EXOPHONIC WOMEN. 3.00 points .

Language is the writer’s instrument; what happens when there is more than one language to choose from, or when a dominant or initial language is replaced by another? What inspires, or necessitates, a writer to practice exophony: to migrate into “foreign” linguistic territory? And in the case of bilingual or plurilingual writers, what factors determine the language(s) chosen for creative expression, and what might cause that choice to shift over time? To what degree do exophonic writers create a third, hybrid language? And how might their works underscore the mutability and instability of language itself? This seminar will focus on a series of women who, either for political or personal reasons, have reshaped and revised their linguistic points of reference, radically questioning—and perhaps willfully subverting—notions of nationality, identity, linguistic normativity, and a “mother tongue”. Special attention will be paid to the reception of exophonic writers, to feminist narratives of separation and self-fashioning, to mother-daughter dyads, to cases of self-translation, to colonialist and post-colonialist frameworks, and to how the phenomenon of exophony further complicates, but also enriches, the translator’s task. Readings will combine literary texts with essays, interviews, and theoretical writings by and about exophonic writers. In addition to analytical papers, students will have the opportunity to experiment writing in another language and translating themselves into English. All readings will be in English; advanced reading knowledge of a foreign language is recommended but not required

ENGL BC3296 AGAINST COLONIALISM, AGAINST FASCISM. 4.00 points .

The Caribbean poet Aimé Cesairé argued that the terrors of World War II simply reflected colonial practices returned home to their origin, Western Europe. This course investigates the relationship between fascism and colonialism, during moment when we are experiencing a global rise in right-wing authoritarian governments premised on anti-migrant politics. What is the relationship between fascism and colonialism, and democracy, equality, and internationalism? What are the class alliances behind fascism? What are institutions that facilitate it? In a spirit of internationalism, this class brings together classic anti-colonial and anti-fascists works under one umbrella. We will start by reading theoretical texts by Umberto Ecco, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, G.M. Tamás, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gandhi, Tagore, Nancy Cunard, and George Padmore. Texts include: The Underdogs, Azuela’s novel of the Mexican Revolution; Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition; Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir of Italian fascism; The Seventh Cross, a thrilling novel about escaping a German concentration camp by Anne Seghers, who herself escaped through France; Arab writers Etel Adnan, Emile Habibi, and Ghassan Kanafani; My Tender Matador by Chilean queer/trans author Pedro Lemebel; Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman; Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Roy; and Kureishi and Frears’s queer countercultural film, Sammie and Rosie Get Laid

ENGL BC3297 UNSILENT VOICES: THE MEDIEVAL LYRIC IN EUROPE. 3.00 points .

From the fall of the Western Empire to the Protestant Reformation, a period of over 1000 years, poets in Europe produced an extraordinarily rich and varied body of lyric poetry that continues to exert a major influence on world literature today. While some of this poetry is religious in nature, a great deal also addresses such diverse themes as desire, selfhood, politics, gender, and humanity’s relation to the non-human world. In this class we will examine medieval lyrics originally composed in a number of languages including but not limited to Old and Middle English, Latin, Occitan, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, French, German and Portuguese. Aspiring polyglots welcome, but all readings will be provided in English translation. This course presumes no previous knowledge of medieval history or literature

ENGL BC3299 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EFFECT: EARLY MODERN TO MODERN. 4.00 points .

American poetry after 1960 famously took on a new intimacy and freshness of tone. Often called “confessional,” this poetry often does not actually express the kind of guilty self-revelation such a term implies. As the critic David Kalstone put it, “American poetry of this period became increasingly available to autobiographical energies of all sorts, not simply to writing which was desperate and on the edge.” This course examines some of that poetry, and its non-confessional use of an autobiographical “I.” We will explore how this poetry, far from representing a rejection of tradition, drew on early modern work to imbue seemingly modern autobiographical effects with new quickness and life

ENGL BC3417 PERSIAN POETICS IN WORLD LITERATURE. 4.00 points .

Through a transcontinental network of poets and poetics from Iran and Russia to Germany and the United States, in this course we will: 1) learn about classical Persian poetry that was translated widely and contributed to the development of World Literature (the cornerstone of which was Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s weltliteratur) and to study different translations and adaptations of this poetry; 2) study world poetry that Iranian poets had translated into Persian and analyze how these translations may have affected modern Persian poetics; 3) read in comparison modern Persian poetry and African diasporic poetry, discuss the intersections of the power structures of gender, class, race and ethnicity, and analyze how these power structures manifested themselves in pre-revolutionary Iran (and ultimately, what can be learned from including this historical context in contemporary Caribbean and African American studies). On a broader scale, this course aims to place Persian poetry and poetics within a world literature discourse, both in terms of its historical contributions to this discourse as well as the discourse’s contributions to Persian poetics. It is meant to encourage you to investigate the role that translation plays in world literary studies; at the same time, it acknowledges the limits of global markets of literature and their politics of translation. Weeks eight through thirteen of the course in which Iranian poetry is put into conversation with African diasporic poetry, therefore, demonstrate the possibilities that open up in world literary studies when scholars expand their focus beyond proven literary connections and underscore cultural provenance as a basis for comparison

ENGL BC3418 DESIRE AND METAMORPHOSIS. 3.00 points .

Change is fundamental to our experience as human beings, and the experience of change lies at the heart of most great stories. Sometimes this is a transition that the heroine has desired; other times, alteration and transformation arise from sources mysterious and unknown, or as a result of the journey the story has brought them. This course examines the element of change in a wide range of literature, from Ovid to Maggie Nelson, from Shakespeare to Roxane Gay—but it also provides an opportunity for students to consider the ways in which they, too have been changed—by joy, by trauma, by time. In addition to writing critically about the works we will read together, students will also write a personal essay about their experience of metamorphosis; this essay will be examined in a modified workshop format. At semester’s end, students will re-write and change that same essay, in hopes of seeing how revision on the page might provide a model for understanding the metamorphoses we experience as human beings on this earth. Authors will likely include Ovid, Kafka, Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, Shaun Tan, Roxane Gay, George Saunders, Arthur C. Clarke, Shakespeare, and Maggie Nelson. There will be a final exam and a critical paper, as well as the personal essay, in two drafts

ENRE BC3810 LITERARY APPROACHES TO BIBLE. 4.00 points .

Interpretive strategies for reading the Bible as a work with literary dimensions. Considerations of poetic and rhetorical structures, narrative techniques, and feminist exegesis will be included. Topics for investigation include the influence of the Bible on literature

AFEN BC3815 SHANGE ＆ DIGITAL STORYTELLING. 4.00 points .

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at http://bit.ly/Ntozake2019. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Students who successfully complete into this course will be eligible to take the second half of the course in Spring 2019. NOTE: There will be three extra sessions scheduled in the Digital Humanities Center. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: https://bit.ly/AFEN3815. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Shange’s stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in feminist history. We will examine Shange’s works through the dual lenses of “embodied knowledge” and historical context. In conjunction with our multidisciplinary analysis of primary texts, students will be introduced to archival research in Ntozake Shange’s personal archive at Barnard College. Thus the seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shange's work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. You can find more information and apply for the course at https://bit.ly/AFEN3815

AFEN BC3816 The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling. 4 points .

Prerequisites: AFEN BC3815 or equivalent.

This course has a prerequisite and an application:  http://bit.ly/AFEN3816 . This hands-on, project based course introduces students to the use of digital tools and sources to organize and manage their archival research, creatively interpret their findings, and communicate their results to the public. This semester, the course is somewhat different from the usual research course in that, rather than simply going more deeply into the course focus, you will be asked to apply your knowledge to make new things. Working with the Barnard Digital Humanities Center, you will develop projects that teach some aspect of Shange's work and or feminist movements. But while making these new things, we will have ongoing discussions about the nature of digital life and evolving protocols for digital work. You will make plans to visit the archive appropriate to your project (in most cases this will be the Barnard Archives, but they might include sites such as The Billy Rose Theatre Division at the NYPL, or the Amiri Baraka collection at Columbia University) as well as doing background reading for your project.  By the end of the semester, you'll have sharpened your research skills while also acquiring digital, teamwork, and project management skills that will be useful in other classes and beyond.

AFEN BC3817 Black Shakespeare. 4.00 points .

This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s Othello will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor

ENGL GU4010 THE CANTERBURY TALES. 3.00 points .

This course has several parallel purposes. First and foremost, we explore an enormously ambitious and brilliant work of literature, both in its local variety (the individual tales, their prologues and epilogues, their self-conscious placement within late medieval cultural conventions), and in its overarching structures. This of course involves learning about the language in which Chaucer wrote, Middle English. Second, we think about Chaucer’s position in late medieval literary culture, especially in England, and in the social world of his own day: at once a minor royal functionary and increasingly recognized as an important writer; an innovator in his immediate literary context but an historical situation of our own readership, for which Chaucer has become “Chaucer” (as he started to be in his own day), even many kinds of “Chaucer,” which continue to evolve as our reading culture does

Senior Seminars and Senior Project in Creative Writing

Enrollment in English senior seminars and the senior project in creative writing is restricted to Barnard senior English majors. Enrollment in the English/Film senior seminar is limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. For senior seminar course descriptions and the exact expected graduation dates for which the registration system considers students to be seniors this academic year, visit this page of English Department website:  https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

ENGL BC3992 SENIOR PROJECT IN CREATIVE WRITING. 4.00 points .

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a concentration in creative writing. This creative writing workshop represents an opportunity for creative writing concentrators to focus on one large project that will serve as a capstone senior project. As in a typical writing workshop, much of the focus will be on sharing and critiquing student work. Unlike other workshops, in this class students will focus on building out a longer project—such as a more ambitious full-length story for fiction and creative nonfiction writers and a chapbook for poets. This means students will discuss work by writers who may not share their own genre. We will focus on generating new work, developing your writing process, and creating new possibilities and momentum for your piece, as well as trying to create a sense of community among the concentrators. We will also conduct in-class writing exercises in response to short reading assignments and class lectures. Students should be aware of two important notes: (1) This class is limited to senior English majors who have already been approved to be creative writing concentrators; and (2) this course fulfills the requirement for concentrators to finish a senior project, but not the academic senior seminar requirement. This class is about your own writing and that of your classmates. This class will be what you make of it!

ENGL BC3993 SENIOR SEMINAR IN FILM AND LITERATURE. 4.00 points .

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors with a Film Studies concentration and Barnard senior Film Studies majors. To see the current course description, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

ENGL BC3997 SENIOR SEMINAR IN ENGLISH. 4.00 points .

Enrollment limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

ENGL BC3998 SENIOR SEMINAR IN ENGLISH. 4.00 points .

Enrollment is limited to Barnard senior English majors. To see the current course description for each section, visit the English Department website: https://english.barnard.edu/english/senior-seminars

Independent Studies

ENGL BC3996 SPECIAL PROJECT IN ENGLISH. 1.00 point .

Application required: https://english.barnard.edu/english/independent-studies. Senior English majors who are concentrating in writing and who have completed two creative writing courses will normally take this Special Project in combination with an additional creative writing course. Senior English majors who are concentrating in theatre and who have completed three courses in theatre history/dramatic literature will normally take this Special Project in combination with an additional dramatic literature course. For both writing and theatre concentrators, this combined special project counts in place of one senior seminar. In certain cases, ENGL BC3999 may be substituted for the Special Project. In rare cases, the English Department Chair may permit an English major not concentrating in writing or theatre to take ENGL BC3996 in combination with another course

ENGL BC3999 INDEPENDENT STUDY. 1.00-4.00 points .

Application required: https://english.barnard.edu/english/independent-studies. Senior majors who wish to substitute Independent Study for one of the two required senior seminars should consult the chair. Permission is given rarely and only to students who present a clear and well-defined topic of study, who have a department sponsor, and who submit their proposals well in advance of the semester in which they will register. There is no independent study for screenwriting or film production

Summer Courses

ENGL BC1021 FEMINIST LIFE WRITING. 3.00 points .

Feminists have famously claimed that "the personal is political." Accordingly, life writing--in various genres--has been an important form for feminists across generations. In this class, we will explore the different ways in which feminists have used these modes to create visions of the self, to challenge the roles and self-images given to them, and to imagine new narratives. In particular, we'll explore questions of genre: so many of these writers have developed hybrid genres or challenged the boundaries of genre in order to write their lives. Looking at examples of life writing including letters, diaries and journals, graphic memoirs, and "traditional" autobiographies, we will examine these forms through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability. Readings are subject to change, but may include: Audre Lorde, Zami; Alison Bechdel, Fun Home; Cherrie Moraga, Loving in the War Years; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts; Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior; poems by Adrienne Rich; Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Janet Mock, Redefining Realness, and selected shorter pieces. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider our primary texts from various critical approaches: including sexuality studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and transgender studies

ENGL BC1022 BAD LOVE. 3.00 points .

This seminar will read stories of love gone bad, of romances that end catastrophically, that damage lovers or leave victims along the way. We will illuminate the consuming fantasy of the romance genre in its quest for "true love," as well as a range of emotions – rage and revenge, narcissism and self-protection, obsession and oblivion – that surface in its wake. We will also look at shifting interpretations of "bad love," from Plato, to the Galenic theory of the humors, to the sociology of court-culture, to Freudian and finally contemporary neurobiological explanations of feelings. Students are welcome to propose texts of their own interests to open this course to the widest range of interests. In addition to seminar discussion, there will be weekly individual tutorials with Professor Hamilton as well as interviews with a neurobiologist and a psychologist

ENGL BC1023 FEMINISM, SCIENCE, ＆ REPRODUCTIVE TECH. 3.00 points .

Reproduction is both a biological and social process—one that is often the target of deep-seated ideas about identity, culture, science, and technology. How have contraceptives, pharmaceuticals, and other technologies shaped reproductive experiences? What does the use and distribution of these scientific innovations reveal about existing power structures and social stratification? What liberatory possibilities do these technologies enable, and what are their limitations? Course material will center work by reproductive justice scholar-activists and feminist science and technology studies scholarship, including work by Dorothy Roberts, Alexandra Stern, Emily Martin, Alondra Nelson, and others

ENGL BC3304 THE ART OF THE ESSAY. 3.00 points .

What makes the essay of personal experience an essay rather than a journal entry? How can one's specific experience transcend the limits of narrative and transmit a deeper meaning to any reader? How can a writer transmit the wisdom gained from personal experience without lecturing her reader? In The Art of the Essay, we explore the answers to these questions by reading personal essays in a variety of different forms. We begin with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century philosopher who popularized the personal essay as we know it and famously asked, “What do I know?,” and follow the development of the form as a locus of rigorous self-examination, doubt, persuasion, and provocation. Through close reading of a range of essays from writers including Annie Dillard, George Orwell, Jamaica Kincaid, and June Jordan, we analyze how voice, form, and evidence work together to create a world of meaning around an author's experience, one that invites readers into conversations that are at once deeply personal and universal in their consequences and implications

ENGL BC3307 THE 'GLOBAL' NOVEL. 3.00 points .

“Yes, globalization can produce homogeneity, but globalization is also a threat to homogeneity.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, 2006. Thinking through the arguments both in favor of and against globalization, particularly in the realm of cultural productions, in this course we will discuss the “global” novel. To that end, using the introductory essay from The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century as a starting point to discuss five novels from across the globe, we’ll investigate what is meant by “global” and what the criteria for including novels in this categorization are. We will also consider whether there is an erasure of cultural difference and nuance in reading novels using a globalizing perspective in order to render them more approachable for a (primarily) US audience. In order to think through and challenge this category of the global, we will also read novels that can be roughly categorized as postcolonial. We will thus consider how struggles for independence and the desire to locate one’s identity either within freshly liberated nation-states or in the process of immigrating to former metropoles could give rise to cultural and psychological anxieties. We will also consider the manner in which late-stage capitalism could indeed push toward homogenized senses of self that manifest in a category such as the “global novel” and whether arguments could be made in favor of such homogenization. Ultimately, we will think about the politics of globalization and the desire to include in or exclude from the “global” certain locations, cultural products, or peoples

ENGL BC3308 QUEER GENRES. 3.00 points .

In this class, we will focus on queer narratives of the self to explore how authors represent queerness across centuries and genres, and how these queer narratives are informed by various historical, national, cultural and political contexts. Through a comparative, transnational and intersectional approach that takes into account the particularities of each author’s context, we will aim to answer the following questions: How do various cultural, national, linguistic, religious or political contexts affect the way queer identities are defined and represented in literature? How do these authors represent the intersections of queerness with race, class, ethnicity, disability and citizenship? How have queer narratives developed over time and across cultures in conversation with local and global modes of conceptualizing gender and sexuality? How do queer authors utilize the particularities of each genre to create new forms of self-expression? Texts will span various genres such as short stories, poems, memoirs, graphic novels, novels and personal essays by authors such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Sappho, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, Adrienne Rich, Casey Plett and Imogen Binnie. Additionally, we will read critical and theoretical works that will urge us to consider these works from a range of perspectives, such as queer studies, feminist studies, disability studies, and transgender studies

ENGL BC3309 RENAISSANCE DRAMA. 3.00 points .

This class offers a general introduction to English drama at the moment when it became a major art form. Renaissance London gave birth to a booming theatrical world, with plays that reflected the diverse urban life of the city, as well as the layered and often contradictory inner life of the individual. This poetically rich theater was less concerned with presenting answers, and more with staging questions—about gender, religion, power, love, sex, authority, class, violence, and more. We will encounter these questions in works by Shakespeare and other major authors who populated this literary scene: Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, the ever-popular “Anonymous,” and others. Putting them in dialogue with their social world, and situating them within a culture of performance, we will engage with the plays via detailed close reading and literary analysis

Cross-Listed Courses

CPLT BC3204 Literary Worldmaking: Two Case Studies. 4.00 points .

This seminar engages students in the immersive and intensive reading of two masterworks of modern prose fiction: Middlemarch, published by George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) in 1871-2 in England, and The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, composed by Cao Xueqin (and continued by Gao E) in the late 18th-century moment of Qing-dynasty China. While using devices and conventions from different narrative traditions, these novels operate in the mode of realism and do so at a monumental and panoramic scale, creating literary worlds that reflect the realia of historical lifeworlds. Beyond representing aspects of empirically recognizable worlds, these novels also incorporate philosophical reflection on their own means of representation, on their very status as fiction, on the power and limits of imaginative worldmaking. By studying these novels as cases of literary worldmaking, we will take the opportunity also to reflect critically in this class on the world that emerges–and the process of worldmaking that gets activated–in our very experience of studying these texts together. We will consider how cosmopolitanism, as a guiding ideal of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment university, may be renewed by literary study to help us inhabit a world of common humanity that is richer and more complex than is evident in particularist localisms or a satellite-view, techno-economic globalism. Middlemarch we will read in its entirety. For the sake of time, we will read, in David Hawkes’ translation, the 80-chapter version of The Story of the Stone, or the Dream of the Red Chamber, attributed to Cao Xueqin, instead of the 120-chapter version, with the last 40 chapters attributed to Gao E. If you can and wish to read the text in Chinese, please speak to Professor Sun about the option of scheduling extra discussion sessions

DNCE BC3000 From Page to Stage: Interactions of Literature and Choreography. 3 points .

A survey of how dance and embodied performance adapt textual sources and even generate text. How do moving bodies enhance or subvert words in order to tell a story, and whose story do they tell? Includes the study of plays, poems, and political speech; and of ballet, experimental dance, dance-theater, silent film, physical theater, and puppetry

ENGL UN3033 THE EARLY CHAUCER. 3.00 points .

FILM BC3119 SCREENWRITING FUNDAMENTALS. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Priority is given to Film Studies majors/concentrations in order of class seniority. Corequisites: (Since this is a Film course, it does not count as a writing course for English majors with a Writing Concentration.) Prerequisites: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Priority is given to Film Studies majors/concentrations in order of class seniority. Corequisites: (Since this is a Film course, it does not count as a writing course for English majors with a Writing Concentration.) This course is ideal for writers of their FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD screenplays. The first several weeks will focus on STORY: What it is, what it isn’t, how to recognize the difference. How to find your own individual stories that nobody else in the universe can tell. From there we will make the transition to the highly individualized techniques, the strengths and limitations, the dynamics of telling a SCREEN STORY; what to leave in, what to leave out. As Michelangelo puts it—starting with a block of marble and chipping away everything that isn’t David. Through studies of existing screenplays and films in coordination with and hands-on writing exercises which we will share in class, we will develop our skills in all aspects of screenwriting; building fascinating characters, dialogue, story construction (The BIG PICTURE) and scene construction (The Small Picture) Perfection is not the goal; but rather it is to be able to say truly at the end of each day’s writing, “I did the best I could with what I had at the time. (Phillip Roth quoting heavyweight champion Joe Louis)

FILM BC3120 ADVANCED SCREENWRITING. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Priority is given to Film Studies majors/concentrations in order of class seniority. Corequisites: (Since this is a Film course, it does not count as a writing course for English majors with a Writing Concentration.) Prerequisite: FILM BC3201 or equivalent. First priority enrollment is given to senior Film Studies majors/concentrations. For more information on this semester's visiting instructor from the Artemis Rising Foundation Filmmaker Fellowship Program, visit: https://athenacenter.barnard.edu/arff This screenwriting seminar provides students an in-depth understanding of the short form which will help them turn their ideas into a short film script (up to 10 pages in length). With a focus on studying contemporary international short films students will learn to write their own short screenplay, as well as learn to give and receive feedback and receive tips on revising their scripts. Homework assignments will include watching films, reading short stories, writing exercises and reading screenplays

FILM BC3201 INTRO FILM ＆ MEDIA STUDIES. 3.00 points .

Prerequisites: Open to first-year students. We derive much of our information about the world from visual media. Social networks, television, cinema: all shape our aesthetic sensibilities and our political visions. Yet we often lack a basic understanding of what could be called “visual literacy.” This introductory course gives students the critical tools to analyze how film and other visual media really work – in order to appreciate their artistic and social achievements, as well as to guard against their insidious manipulative devices. In the first part of the semester, we focus on film analysis through a detailed study of the different production phases of filmmaking – from screenwriting and mise-en-scène to editing and film scoring. We pay special attention to the way in which certain stylistic and narrative choices have particular ideological effects. The second part of the course looks at film history through a comprehensive, chronological overview of its main movements and periods, including the coming of sound in Hollywood cinema, post-war Italian Neorealism, the emergence of world auteurs, New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, etc. Students will use the hermeneutical tools learnt in film analysis to intellectually engage with some masterworks of film history. In the third and final part of the semester, we study the major debates of film theory from perspectives such as auteurism, formalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial and queer studies, etc. Required screenings include Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922), Sunrise (Murnau, 1927), Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929), Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950), Breathless (Godard, 1960), Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967), The Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas, 1968), Seven Beauties (Wertmüller, 1974), Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986), Paris Is Burning (Livingstone, 1990), and Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)

THTR UN3150 CRITICAL HISTORIES OF DRAMA, THEATRE, AND PERFORMANCE I. 4.00 points .

This course undertakes a dialectical approach to reading and thinking about the history of dramatic theatre, interrogating the ways writing inflects, and is inflected by, the material dynamics of performance. Course undertakes careful study of the practices of performance, and of the sociocultural, economic, political, and aesthetic conditions animating representative performance in “classical” theatres globally; course will also emphasize development of important critical concepts for the analysis of drama, theatre, and performance. Topics include the sociology of theatre, the impact of print on conceptions of performance, representing gender and race, the politics of intercultural performance, and the dynamics of court performance. Writing: 2-3 papers; Reading: 1-2 plays, critical and historical reading per week; final examination. Fulfills one (of two) lecture requirements for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors

THTR UN3151 CRITICAL HISTORIES OF DRAMA, THEATRE, AND PERFORMANCE 2. 4.00 points .

This course undertakes a dialectical approach to reading and thinking about the history of dramatic theatre, interrogating the ways writing inflects, and is inflected by, the material dynamics of performance in the modern era. Course undertakes careful study of the practices of performance, and of the sociocultural, economic, political, and aesthetic conditions animating representative performances in theatres globally; course will also emphasize development of important critical concepts for the analysis of drama, theatre, and performance. Topics include the sociology of theatre, the impact of print on conceptions of performance, representing gender and race, the politics of intercultural performance, and the dynamics of emerging forms and critical practices of performance analysis. Writing: 2-3 papers; Reading: 1-2 plays, critical and historical reading per week; final examination. Fulfills one (of two) lecture requirements for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts majors

Print Options

Send Page to Printer

Print this page.

Download Page (PDF)

The PDF will include all information unique to this page.

Download Catalog PDF

The PDF will include the full 2023-2024 catalog

Student Publications

TKTNK: Intersection

TKTNK is an undergraduate publication published by the Barnard + Columbia Architecture Society promoting architectural writing, research, and proposals that span a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, creative writing, urban studies, sustainability, planning, and preservation. DOWNLOAD

TKTNK: Portfolio

Tktnk: abstraction vs representation, tktnk: archive.

Onsite: The Olympic Effect

OnSite is an annual journal published by the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department that leverages the critical work of students in Curating Architecture, a seminar and workshop led by Adjunct Assistant Professor Irina Verona. To request a digital copy, email [email protected]. 

Onsite: Public

Onsite: different, onsite: boundaries, advanced architectural research and design (design iii).

Design for Environmental Diplomacy: Amman

Architectural Design III provides our most advanced architecture majors with an opportunity to do research and design on urgent issues in an international context. Each year, the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department publishes a book compiling our students' research and projects from this course.  To request a digital copy, email [email protected]. 

Resources for an Urban World: Istanbul

Design for diplomacy: china.

Architectural Design III provides our most advanced architecture majors with an opportunity to do research and design on urgent issues in an international context. Each year, the Barnard and Columbia Architecture Department publishes a book compiling our students' research and projects from this course. 

To request a digital copy, email [email protected]. 

WEBSITE ESSENTIALS

12 best writing portfolio examples and how to create your own

• Brandi Hunter

Get started by: Creating a website →  | Getting a domain →

When it comes to starting a business  around your writing, visibility is everything. The more well-curated and attention-grabbing your writing is, the higher the chance that potential clients and publications will notice your talent. Making a website  that presents your writing portfolio can help introduce the industry to your talent and invite new work.

You may be thinking, “I’m a writer, not a website designer”—that’s where Wix can help. Its templates and beginner-friendly website builder make getting started as straightforward as it can get. To get the creative juices flowing, here are 12 writing portfolio examples from Wix users. Later on, we’ll provide a more straightforward step-by-step guide to building your own.

Start building your online portfolio  with Wix today.

12 writing portfolio examples

Jed Donahue

Sam Carlson Creative

Lauryn Higgins

Jessica Van Devanter

Madison Gray

Jane-Ellen Robinet

Christina Sterbenz

Bryn Dippold

Charlotte Kho

Emma Newell

Maddie Pfeiffer

Rachel A.G. Gilman

01. Jed Donahue

Jed Donahue’s website is a great example of how speaking to your client’s pain points can compel them to reach out. The homepage header copy, “When you need great content, I’m here to help,” focuses on the customer’s needs. Testimonials from previous clients provide proof that Jed can deliver results. Meanwhile, the “What I can do for you” section gives a practical breakdown of the workflow and services that clients can expect.

02. Sam Carlson

Sam Carlson takes his writing portfolio a step further by putting his client work front and center. He highlights his creative flair and prowess as a copywriter by including engaging introductions for each case study. Every project page boasts a concise and clever summary, followed by the client's logo and key project assets. Additionally, his "Fun" page, which presents his personal projects, offers a glimpse of his hobbies and talents outside of writing.

03. Lauryn Higgins

If you, like Lauryn Higgins , have an extensive writing portfolio that includes several bylines with well-known media companies, you can strategically add publication logos to your website and link them to your author pages to show off your credibility. On her “Awards and Publications” page, she features snapshots of some of her best clips, along with several awards.

04. Jessica Van Devanter 

If you don’t have any visual content to display and don’t want to go through the process of finding a set of free-to-use visuals that match your branding and content, take a look at Jessica Van Devanter’s writing portfolio. By making the site’s design the focal point, she bypasses the need for external graphics or images that may not align with her branding. 

Her logo, a shrewd-looking fox, serves as the background for the large header, which captures the viewer's attention upon arrival. Below it, a mountain graphic underlays the main content area, providing a sense of continuity without overpowering the text. 

The structure of each page is reminiscent of a timeline, with her written works positioned as milestones, guiding visitors through her professional journey. The bright green and white font colors provide a deliberate contrast against the muted blue background, ensuring readability and drawing the eye to her written work.

Use Wix’s logo maker  to start building out your personal brand.

05. Madison Gray

As a writer and an artist, Madison Gray masterfully demonstrates both skill sets throughout her portfolio. Pairing her highlighted works with original images draws visitors in and creates a visually engaging narrative of her talents. Each project page indicates which skills she utilized to complete the project, offering a comprehensive understanding of her multifaceted abilities.

06. Jane-Ellen Robinet  

Jane-Ellen Robinet limits her writing portfolio to a page to help website visitors get the information they need quickly. The above-the-fold section summarizes her unique value proposition (“INSIGHT + PERSPECTIVE + EXPERIENCE”) and provides specific job titles for the services she provides (“Editor | Writer”). The header features anchor links to each section of the page to ensure easy navigation. 

07. Christina Sterbenz

Rather than categorizing work by publications, Christina Sterbenz structures her portfolio page around writing topics and pairs each section with a compelling image from one of the relevant clips. This strategy adds visual appeal and gives each topic a personal touch, making the stories more approachable and intriguing to visitors. The images, paired with informative captions, humanize the subjects, enticing readers to delve deeper into her work.

In terms of website design, the portfolio benefits from a clean layout and a modern, minimalist font, which together enhance the site's readability and aesthetic appeal. Visitors can effortlessly scan the pages, finding what they are looking for without feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, the consistent use of design motifs—such as circles and lines throughout the site—contributes to a cohesive and memorable brand identity.

Like this format? Use this creative CV website template  to get started.

08. Bryn Dippold  

Bryn Dippold uses Wix’s blog maker  to showcase her work samples. This approach of republishing content directly on her portfolio, rather than merely linking out to external publications, serves as a strategic method for keeping visitors on her site for longer and providing a comprehensive view of her work.

Many Wix website templates already come with an integrated blog. Alternatively, you can choose to add the blog feature to any template, tailoring it to fit your unique style. Wix allows you to customize the blog settings, enabling you to curate and present your best work in a manner that aligns with your professional image and goals. 

09. Charlotte Kho 

Charlotte Kho uses neutral colors, layered design elements and striking imagery to introduce herself as a digital and creative storyteller. The “Resume” page provides a lot of information, but its clean layout is easy on the eyes, and you have the option to download her CV. On the “Work” page, Charlotte offers a small selection of her best work, plus links to view more of her published pieces.

Like this layout? Make it your own as Charlotte did by customizing this business CV website template .

10. Emma Newell 

Emma Newell's website demonstrates a balance of simplicity and engaging elements, creating a visually appealing and user-friendly experience. The site employs subtle animations that add a dynamic touch without overwhelming the visitor. Notably, when you click on any link in the menu bar, the content below appears to swipe out of view as new content takes its place. This seamless effect maintains the homepage's structure and provides an uninterrupted browsing experience.

11. Maddie Pfeifer

Maddie Pfeifer effectively leads with her experience by featuring her resume on the homepage. It details her past work, highlights her skillset and lists the awards she has received in the course of her career. We appreciate that she prominently placed her contact information above the fold for easy accessibility.

Her website is a model of organization, making excellent use of Wix’s advanced menu features . The dropdown functionality in her navigation bar allows for an expanded array of options, enhancing the user experience. Visitors, when exploring the “Portfolio” page link, are greeted with the option to select content categories like “Event coverage” or “Crime & courts,” tailoring their browsing to their interests.

12. Rachel A.G. Gilman 

Rachel A.G. Gilman elevates her homepage's simplicity with a playful, animated headshot, contrasting colors and a classic font choice, creating a dynamic first impression. Under the “Writing” tab, her comprehensive archive is meticulously sorted into distinct categories, making it easy to sift through her published work and accomplishments.

How to make a writing portfolio of your own

After exploring some of the best portfolio website examples , you’re probably eager to get started on learning how to make a portfolio  of your own. Whether you're a seasoned writer or just getting started, these tips will help you present your work in a way that captivates and communicates your unique voice and skills. 

01. Identify your target audience

To properly tailor your site design to your audience, you need to identify who you’re looking to impress. For instance, if you’re using this type of website  to pitch to editors, you might consider spotlighting your best features or most impressive bylines. On the other hand, if you’re cultivating a professional portfolio  for freelance clients, you might want to put testimonials or a list of services front and center.

02. Establish your goals 

Setting clear goals is crucial to track your progress and success. If your objective is to boost engagement with freelance clients, you might measure this by the number of inquiries or project offers you receive through your portfolio site. On the other hand, if increasing your visibility as a writer online is your goal, you could focus on monitoring website traffic, page views, or how long visitors stay on your site. Regularly assessing these aspects will help you understand what's effective and what needs improvement in your portfolio.

03. Choose the right platform

When looking for a platform for your online presence, choose a portfolio website builder  that aligns with your technical ability and the amount of time you can dedicate to maintenance. Although creating a bespoke website might be impressive and a simple clippings curator (such as Muck Rack) would be convenient, it’s a better idea to go for a builder that combines the best of both worlds, offering both customizability and convenience. 

With Wix, you’ll have hundreds of customizable templates to choose from and AI tools that make designing and filling it with images a breeze. Furthermore, Wix enriches your website with features like built-in forms, custom email addresses, and newsletter capabilities, ensuring you can easily connect with your audience and maintain those connections effortlessly.

Check out this selection of Wix website templates for writers .

04. Decide how you want to structure your showcase

When building the “Works” or “Clips” section of your online writing portfolio, your focus should be on showcasing your writing as well as highlighting the outlets you've collaborated with. Select pieces that represent your best work and reflect the type of work you aspire to continue doing. Remember, it's always about quality over quantity. A handful of outstanding pieces will have a greater impact than a multitude of average ones.

If you're at the beginning of your career and lack professional bylines, don't hesitate to include your best work from college or independent projects. Additionally, consider starting a blog that reflects the kind of work you aim to do professionally. 

05. Build an archive

Imagine losing your most valued work if a website goes down or a publisher removes your article. To prevent this, create an archive on your portfolio site. By uploading and publishing posts using the Wix content management system, you not only safeguard your work but also boost your site’s SEO and engage visitors more effectively. However, remember to check your contracts, as some publishers may restrict this. If time is limited, consider downloading your articles as PDFs and linking to them on a dedicated page. It's best to maintain this archive separately from your featured works, ensuring they continue to be the main attraction.

06. Flesh out the rest of your site

Your writing portfolio is more than just your work; it's a complete presentation of your professional persona. Each page on your site plays a critical role in telling your story. Here's how to make them count:

Home: The homepage is your portfolio's front door, welcoming and guiding visitors. It's crucial that this page clearly communicates what you offer as a writer. Make sure visitors can instantly understand your area of expertise and writing style.

About: On your “About” page, detail your professional journey, educational background and skill set. This page is an excellent place to infuse personality into your resume. Consider including a PDF version of your resume so hiring managers can add it to their databases.

Contact:  The “Contact” page is your open invitation for communication. Offer multiple methods to reach you, such as a contact form and an email address. Consider using scheduling software  to make it easy for potential clients to set up consultation calls. 

When writing the copy for these pages, make sure your tone is consistent, engaging and speaks to your desired audience. If incorporating imagery, make sure they’re high-quality, complement the text and reinforce your professional image. Each element should seamlessly blend to form a cohesive and inviting online presence.

07. Test and publish

Broken links, grammatical errors or faulty contact forms may lead visitors to doubt the quality of your work or discourage them from reaching out. Make sure to do a thorough assessment of your site, and consider sharing your writing portfolio with others to get their feedback.

08. Update your website

Regularly update your portfolio with your latest work. This keeps your site fresh and shows potential clients your active involvement and range of skills. A current portfolio can also inspire new project ideas among visitors.

Top tips for your writing portfolio

When it comes to planning, creating and maintaining your writing portfolio, there are a number of tips to help you create a great one.

Tailor your portfolio to the specific writing niche or genre you're pursuing. Include samples that demonstrate your expertise and writing style in that area. Your writing portfolio is a showcase of how well you with with words and content, make sure it reflects that to the best of your ability and experience.

Prioritize showcasing your strongest writing samplespieces, even if it means having fewer samples. Choose work that highlights your skills, versatility, and ability to meet client expectations.

Each piece in your portfolio should tell a story. Briefly explain the project's context, your approach, the challenges faced and the outcomes achieved.

Include testimonials from satisfied clients for the purpose of adding social proof and to demonstrate the quality of your work.

Make your portfolio easy to navigate. Use a clear menu, categorize your work and implement smooth transitions between pages.

Let your personality and writing style shine through. Use visuals, tone of voice, and layout to create a cohesive and memorable brand identity that reflects you and your work.

Related Posts

How to make a professional portfolio

How to create a marketing portfolio: tips and examples

17 best portfolio layouts for creative professionals

Was this article helpful?

Virtual Tour

Experience University of Idaho with a virtual tour. Explore now

• Discover a Career
• Find a Major
• Experience U of I Life

More Resources

• Admitted Students
• International Students

Take Action

• Find Financial Aid
• View Deadlines
• Find Your Rep

Helping to ensure U of I is a safe and engaging place for students to learn and be successful. Read about Title IX.

Get Involved

• Clubs & Volunteer Opportunities
• Recreation and Wellbeing
• Student Government
• Student Sustainability Cooperative
• Academic Assistance
• Safety & Security
• Career Services
• Health & Wellness Services
• Register for Classes
• Dates & Deadlines
• Financial Aid
• Sustainable Solutions
• U of I Library

• Upcoming Events

Review the events calendar.

Stay Connected

• Vandal Family Newsletter
• Here We Have Idaho Magazine
• Living on Campus
• Campus Safety
• About Moscow

The largest Vandal Family reunion of the year. Check dates.

Benefits and Services

• Vandal Voyagers Program
• Vandal License Plate
• Submit Class Notes
• Make a Gift
• View Events
• Alumni Chapters
• University Magazine
• Alumni Newsletter

U of I's web-based retention and advising tool provides an efficient way to guide and support students on their road to graduation. Login to VandalStar.

Common Tools

• Administrative Procedures Manual (APM)
• Class Schedule
• OIT Tech Support
• Academic Dates & Deadlines
• U of I Retirees Association
• Faculty Senate
• Staff Council

Graduate Admissions

Office of graduate admissions.

820 Idaho Avenue Morrill Hall, Room 205 Moscow, ID 83843

University of Idaho 875 Perimeter Drive MS 3019 Moscow, ID 83844-3019

Phone: 208-885-4001

Email: [email protected]

Web: More Contact Information

Creative Writing (M.F.A.)

Requirements.

Education Level:  Bachelor's GPA:  3.0 GRE:  No TOEFL/IELTS:  79/6.5 Number of References: 3 Other Req.:  Yes, see below

Availabilities

Terms:  Fall Location:  Moscow Thesis option:  Thesis WRGP Tuition Eligible: Yes Deadline:  Jan. 15

Program Contact

Director of Graduate Studies: Alexandra Teague

Other Requirements

Creative writing specific.

• Prose: 20 pages max
• Poetry: 5-10 poems, 10 pages max
• Analytical essay, 8-20 pages

Grade Point Average (GPA)

Applicants must have a minimum overall Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.00 on a 4.00 grade scale equivalent to U.S. bachelor’s degree. If your GPA meets the minimum admission requirements, the department of major will determine if your overall academic record and test scores meet department requirements.

Note: If you do not meet the minimum 3.00 GPA, your application can be considered for admission if you:

• Earned an undergraduate GPA of 3.0 or higher for your last 60 semester credits or 90 quarter credits.
• Worked in the program specific profession for 5+ years. 
• Obtained a letter of support from a faculty member in the department. 
• Wrote a detailed statement/essay describing your professional experience and potential to succeed academically

Degree Levels and Equivalents

All graduate school applicants must satisfy the following criteria to be considered for graduate admission to the University of Idaho:  Have earned a bachelor's degree from a college or university accredited by a recognized accrediting body, a ministry of education, or an official quality assurance organization in another country. The bachelor's degree should consist of four years of study, equivalent to 120 semester credit hours or 180 quarter hours.

An official academic record from all post-secondary education institutions attended is required. This may take some time so start this early in your application process.

In the instance that official records cannot be obtained, unofficial records may be used to consider your application. These documents are typically issued to the student and may be considered official after further review. This applies to cases where it is impossible to obtain the official records, and will be considered only on a case by case basis.

Domestic Applicants

Students must have a bachelor’s degree from a college or university accredited by a regional accrediting association. If the degree is from a recognized but not regionally accredited institution, the application will be reviewed by the department and by the College of Graduate Studies.

International Applicants

For information about equivalency and required academic credentials by country of education page, use the Degree Equivalency Guide .

The University of Idaho recommends, and reserves the right to require, a professional credential evaluation by an outside, independent party. Reasons for outside review include, but are not limited to, verification of document authenticity, potential transfer credits and the wish to expedite the processing of an application file. You are responsible for supplying the correct academic records and paying for the evaluation service. You will need to request a course-by-course evaluation. Transferring Internationally earned credits requires a course-by-course professional credential evaluation .

The preferred provider of transcript evaluations is:

• World Education Services, Inc.

There is a list of the five services from which the University of Idaho will accept evaluations.

• Visit our professional credential evaluation page .

Precise, word-for-word, English translations are required for all foreign language documents.

English Proficiency

The most common and widely accepted test is the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).

Our institution code for the TOEFL is 4843.

The following are acceptable as proof of English Language Proficiency:

• TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language): minimum overall score of 79 
• IELTS (International English Language Testing System): minimum overall score of 6.5
• MELAB (Michigan English Language Assessment Battery): Minimum overall score of 77
• PTE A (Pearson Test of English Academic): Minimum overall score of 58
• U of I American Language & Culture Program (ALCP) with score of a Level 6/Advanced Pass
• U.S. Education Earned Bachelor, or higher, degree at accredited U.S. institution
• Duolingo English Test: Minimum Overall 110 (as of Spring 2024 admission, the minimum required score will be 115)

A waiver for this requirement is automatically granted to applicants whose education is from countries where English is an official/native language. For more information, visit our English language countries page .

• All tests must have been taken within two years of the semester.
• Some graduate programs have a higher requirement. If so, you will need to take the TOEFL, or equivalent test, and obtain the higher score prior to be granted regular admission.
• Some graduate programs allow admission to be granted to applicants who qualify academically, but have not yet achieved U of I minimum English language requirements. To view information and a list of programs accepting students on this admission, visit our international requirements webpage .

Quick Application Guide

For the best user experience:

• Desktop or laptop advised, mobile devices are not recommended
• Have recommender names and email addresses
• Have electronic versions of your required documents
• Be ready to complete an online application fee

Provide Academic & Personal Information

• Program applying
• Academic background
• English proficiency (if applicable)
• GRE (if applicable)
• Your Contact Information
• Answer varying questions
• Three (3) recommender names and emails
• Resume or Curriculum Vitae (CV)
• Statement of Purpose
• Program Specific Materials (if required)
• Transcript Scans (if applicable)
• Provide payment information

Popular Links

• Graduate Application Status Portal
• Contact Graduate Admissions
• U of I Graduate Priority Deadlines
• Graduate Admissions FAQs

Recommendation for admission is based on the department's decision. Final admission is determined by the College of Graduate Studies.

Important notes to keep in mind  » Learn More

Tuition, Fees, Scholarships and Costs

Visit the following pages to learn more:

• Scholarships and Costs  (General Annual)
• Tuition and Fees (Semester Breakdown)
• Idaho Residency for Tuition Purposes

Letters of Recommendation

The number of letters is up to the academic department/program. Individual programs may require 1 to 3 letters of recommendation. Please  gather the names and email addresses of your recommenders. You will need to enter this information to complete an online application. Remember to inform recommenders in advance that they will receive an invitation to upload their letter of support directly to your application.

• Please use your references institutional email address
• Preferably, letters of recommendation should be issued on the university or company letterhead
• Preferably, your recommendations should come from teaching or research faculty in an area related to your anticipated field of study or a company supervisor who has worked with you and can articulate your merits

For more information, visit our documental resources page .

Submitting Documents

Include your full name on ALL materials and ensure uploads are LEGIBLE .

Any change in specific degree, major or semester before enrollment requires a new application (including uploaded material) and a non-refundable fee.

To be considered  official , all academic records and test scores (ie. transcripts, degree certificates, GRE, TOEFL) must be sent directly from the institution and/or testing center to Graduate Admissions. When these items are submitted by applicants or educational consultants/agencies, approved or not, they are considered  unofficial .

Direct mailing address is:

Graduate Admissions University of Idaho 875 Perimeter Drive MS 3019 Moscow, ID 83844-3019

Additional items  that applicants upload into the application include (if required):

• Resume/Curriculum Vitae (required)
• Statement of Purpose (required)
• Scans of Official Transcripts (optional, see below)
• Personal Information Form (some programs)
• Writing Sample (some programs)
• Portfolio (some programs)

Note: Failure to adhere to these requirements could delay your credential evaluation and/or admission to the University of Idaho. For more information or assistance,  visit our documental resources page .

Unofficial Transcripts

• Applicants may upload scanned copies of official transcripts and translations via the online application. Only scans of high quality (600 dpi or higher, front and back with grading keys/scales) from the University Registrar’s office, also known as original documents from your institution, are acceptable. These scans may be used to determine your acceptance into the program. However, the  official transcript documents will ultimately be required .

Official Transcripts

• Transferring Internationally earned credits requires a course-by-course professional credential evaluation .
• U.S. Institutions: Academic transcripts from each college or university attended must be received by Graduate Admissions directly from the awarding institution in the officially sealed envelope bearing the institution’s official seal, stamp, and/or appropriate signature.
• Graduate Admissions accepts electronic transcripts from U.S. higher education institutions.
• Current or former U of I students: If you have or are currently attending the U of I, you do not need to order U of I transcripts. Graduate Admissions will secure them for you.

Test Scores

• ETS Institution Code (U of I): 4843
• The GRE is only required for some graduate programs.
• Department code (if needed and not supplied): 5199
• A waiver for English language proficiency requirement is automatically granted to students whose education is from countries where English is an official/native language.
• Department code (if needed and not supplied): 99

International

Complete and return the following to Graduate Admissions regardless of your source(s) of funding:

• Certificate of Financial Responsibility Form
• Copy of passport for applicant and all accompanying dependents requiring a Certificate of Eligibility (I-20)
• Current I-20

All students currently in F-1 status at any type of institution (college, university, intensive English institute) in the U.S. who plan to transfer to the University of Idaho must complete the transfer procedure through SEVIS. For more information, see the "Student Visa and SEVIS Information" drop-down below.

Student Visa and SEVIS Information

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services regulations require that every student verify the availability of funds to pay for educational and living expenses before an I-20 or DS-2019 form to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. can be issued.

Immigration regulations require that international students holding F-1 or J-1 student visas be certified as full-time students during the academic year. F-1 graduate students are required to be enrolled in nine credit hours and are allowed to take up to three credits of online coursework toward this requirement. J-1 visa holders are also required to enroll in nine credit hours, but are not allowed to take online classes toward the nine credit requirement.

• Additional documents are required for international students , see the "International" section of the "Submitting Documents" drop-down above.
• Not all programs are eligible for an F-1 or J-1. View the "Program Specific" drop-down or contact the program for information.
• All students currently in F-1 status at any type of institution (college, university, intensive English institute) in the U.S. who plan to transfer to the University of Idaho must complete the transfer procedure through SEVIS.

SEVIS Record Transfer Request (PDF Form)

Transfer Procedure:

• Receive admission to the University of Idaho
• Notify your current school of your intentions to transfer
• Complete Part I of this form (only after you have been admitted and choose to attend U of I)
• Have an international student advisor at your current institution complete Part II
• After you and your current school have determined the date to have your SEVIS record electronically released to the University of Idaho, promptly return this form
• After the release date, the University of Idaho will produce an I-20.